Max wrote: > Tarentino has the intellect of a 14 year old > combined with awesome technical skills. The film is fun.
I think the safest bet is that Tarantino is *intellectually* brilliant. But, yes, the response to oppression depicted in this movie feels like a teenager's fantasy of lashing out against the most immediate sources of his frustration. However, every response to oppression, regardless of whether it is misdirected or not (including the most well organized insurrection), has this irrational cathartic element. Marx is on the record arguing that revolutions, with their irrational eruptions and all, are *necessary* for the oppressed to shake off the "muck of the ages" and build the resolve to reconstruct a society from its foundations. I'm not entirely sure about that. But we don't need to get too Freudian to recognize some sort of id in us, the inner minor in us, unrestrained by the demands of civilized human interaction, particularly its oppressive, historically unjustified aspects. In fact, socialism (I believe it was Trotsky who suggested this) can only stick if it manages to establish social conditions conducive for our ids to find constructive expression. But leaving all that aside, often times, the artist's emotional connection with an audience hinges on temporarily suspending moral judgment to enable the audience to get in touch with its rawer needs. Art, fiction, humor, etc. play this role in any civilized society. Sophocles' or Shakespeare's plays are all full of gory barbarism, cruelty and infantile overreactions of the most violent kind, let alone profanity and aspersive insults. So I imagine the hypocrites of the times abandoning theaters in the middle of plays, calling for censure, etc. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
