s and m (sick and macho)

cartoon life – foto by Smith

I am–or was–an avid Quentin Tarantino fan. Liked his script writing, his film directing, his acting. Still think Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction are great cinema.

Bit I started reassessing him after watching Deathproof, in which Kurt Russell drives around abusing and battering women before brutally killing them with his car. The film ends with three females sadistically beating him to death in a round-robin of violence (which to be fair he has earned). The movie seemed more a tasteless teenage boy sexual fantasy exercise in s&m than the output of a mature artist.

Then I saw his latest–Inglorious Basterds–which is little more than comic book sadistic violence and death using real people. He beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and scalps all the rest of the Nazis they kill. The ones they don’t kill, they slowly carve swastikas in their foreheads with big knives in extreme close-up. The movie’s big ending scene consists of machine gunning women, civilians, and Nazis to death while they’re trapped in a burning exploding movie house–sort of how I felt watching it all. The movie made me feel unclean, down, depressed; I felt it was porno violence disguised as comedy. Someone said that Taratino’s parodying America’s love of violence, but one doesn’t satirize a crime by committing the crime. You are what you do.

The movie made me flash back to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ where Gibson has Christ sadistically whipped in extreme close-up slow motion for 20-30 minutes. Halfway through this brutality, the whipper switches to a hooked whip and the movie shows chunks of Christ’s flesh being ripped off in up-close slow-motion chunks while blood gracefully arcs and splatters.

Before The Passion of Christ, I was a Mel Gibson fan, but afterward I couldn’t stop thinking what a sick twisted mind he had to have to hide a bloody splatter flick in the folds of his unhealthy conservative right-wing religious movie. His later drunken hate-filled tirade against Jews just cemented my disgust for him.

Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds has me lumping him with the same sickos that includes Gibson. It’s taken me decades, but I’m at the point where I won’t watch anything by either of them anymore. To me they belong to the same Neanderthal hate mongering clan that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Dick Cheney. May they each be hoist on the petard of their own verbal filth.

Although what is even more frightening than the sickos above is how large their audiences are, how rich they’ve become pandering to these hate-filled violent bigots.

cartoon violence – foto by Smith