A Society Unraveling in Film

"Look kid, I'm not going to bullshit you, okay? I don't really give a fuck what you know, or don't know. But I'm going to torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information, but because it's amusing to me to torture a cop. You can say anything you want, 'cause I've heard it all before, All you can do is pray for a quick death. Which you ain't going to get."

These words, spoken by Mr. Blonde to a kidnapped cop in Quentin Tarantino's movie Reservoir Dogs, are prelude to a scene of exquisitely choreographed brutality. Mr. Blonde pretends that he is going to shoot the cop in the face to make him writhe in terror, and then, to the bubble-gum-70s sounds of Stealers wheel's "Stuck In The Middle With You," he slices the cop's face with a straight razor, hacks his ear off and then coldly pours gasoline all over him, ignoring his pleas, and light his Zippo before he is blown away by Mr. Orange, lying in a pool of his own blood in the corner.

It is a trademark scene from a seductively disturbing film. And while it is hardly new for a movie to be made popular because of its orgies of blood-letting, Reservoir Dogs is different. The pain and death in this movie are not mere two-dimensional ketchup-intensive scenes from a low budget Friday the 13th sequel or romanticized gunfights from the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger flick: Reservoir Dogs, and its sibling in the emerging genre of films such as it and Pulp Fiction being blazed by writer-directors like Tarantino, it on a new level. They are films more than movies--art, not mass-produced lowbrow entertainment (although they have an unmistakable commercial appeal). They take awards at the Cannes Film Festival in France. They win startled praise from formally sleepy critics who praise them for approaching literature.

And with the critical acclaim has come a growing cult of Quentin Tarantino fans. This is especially evident in the ranks of the college-age generation, cultural trend. Posters of Reservoir Dogs decorate the walls of countless dorm rooms across the campus and across the nation; in my own room we have watched my roommate's copy of the movie probably 30 times or more in the past term.

An artist from France recently remarked to me that Americans do not discuss politics nearly as much as the French do. Instead, he said, we discuss movies. I proposed to him that if this were true, perhaps it is because Americans have become too entrenched and closed-minded in their positions on controversial topics such as abortion or social spending, and so political and cultural discussions inevitably lead not to enlightenment but to anger. If this situation accurately represents reality, then our movies are our surrogate cultural barometer. They provide a safe topic for conversation in which our way of life and beliefs can be touched upon lightly, but more skirted around on tiptoes than full-blown debated.

Today, our cultural barometer is shattering. The most critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies hinge upon violently disturbing visual assaults and a running theme of moral nihilism. In the most cuttingedge cinema, there are no "good guys," no right side to root for in a struggle against evil. More and more movies are following a trend epitomized by Oliver stone's Natural Born Killers (based originally on a story by Tarantino), in which the heroes are psychopaths who kill scores of innocent people and get away with it, riding off into the sunset to commit more acts of ultraviolence, the term coined in the before-its-time A Clockwork Orange. But while Orange aimed to sicken the viewer with its scenes of random gut-check violence, the 90s-style film revels in it.

Much ado has been made by the media about society's desensitization to violence in recent years. Try the experience of going to a movie that supposedly decries violence, such as Menace II Society or Natural Born Killers during which the audience, rather than being shocked or angered by the scenes of random violence and murder, instead breaks into applause and laughter. A friend of mine told me that she even experienced this when she saw Schindler's List.

This is the emerging trend of the mid-90s. If the 80s were the decade of wealth, yuppies and conspicuous consumption, the 90s are becoming the decade of disturbance. In the 80s, Madonna topped the charts with "Material Girl." Today, Nine Inch Nails has become the hottest ticket in America with songs like "Closer," heavily dependent on feedback, dissonance and violent lyrics ("I want to fuck you like an animal/I want to feel you from the inside out/I want to fuck you like an animal/You get me closer to God"). Dark, chaotic music videos that alternate with scenes of glorified murder from the likes of Snoop Doggy Dogg also grace MTV's frequent-rotation roster. The surging phenomenon is evident everywhere one looks; perhaps it explains the sudden trendiness in multiple body piercings and the resurgence of the tattoo.

Do we have a subconscious desire to decivilize ourselves? Every generation has to rebel against the previous one, but all the good things to rebel against--the establishment of the 50s, the wide-eyed leftist political awareness of the 60s, the polyester disco-life of the 70s, the materialistic success drive of the 80s--have already been taken. Grunge-angst, having dispensed with "Greed is good" in the early 90s, now leaves the cutting edge nothing to rebel against but flannel, and what kind of a statement would that be? Nothing is left but to rebel against order itself, to embrace chaos as the ulitimate "fuck you" to the less stylish world, which will probably soon follow suit in its typically pondering yet pandering way.

America is approaching something--a watershed--and when we get there it won't be pretty. Is it too far-fetched to speculate that what we are witnessing is our society unraveling itself? "Things fall apart," wrote Yeats. "The center cannot hold." Even the Roman Empire, after all, eventually fell.

And the reactionary backlash--from the solitary Forrest Gump that battled Natural Born Killers for the number one spot in box office returns last summer to the resurgence of the Republican Party, trumpeting its "traditional values"--indicates that the nation is beginning to sense this impending upheaval and is nostalgically longing for the cultural value system of a safer time. It longs for a time when America was more unified, before cynicism overpowered politics, and when the most disturbing image to be found in popular culture was Edvard Munch's "The Scream," a painting of introspection and angst, not razor blades and agony.

But one can never go back to a more naive time. The culture of disturbance is here, and for better or worse one must be prepared to face its consequences. Like Mr. Blonde's speech before the torture scene, America's new lifestyle of chaos may be prelude to some very difficult times.