Stručni rad
Violence as a Form of Social Criticism in Transgressive Art: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs
Sofija Skuban
orcid.org/0000-0002-6770-8703
; Sveučilište u Novom Sadu
Sažetak
Contemporary art often aims at criticizing the modern society and its values
and in transgressive art this is usually done through the use of violence, which is
represented graphically and matter-of-factly. The films of Quentin Tarantino are
highly transgressive in that respect, and his debut film Reservoir Dogs is even
thought to have initiated a whole new era in the American cinema commonly
known as ‘the new brutality’. Reservoir Dogs helped the American filmmaker
establish his characteristic ‘tarantinoesque’ style in which violence – excessive,
graphic, and even aestheticized – plays a crucial role. This paper will examine the
violence in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs focusing on its nature, its various types and
manifestations, the way it is represented and the purpose of such representation.
Violence in Reservoir Dogs is omnipresent: it lingers throughout the whole film
and dictates its narration to reach its peak in the infamous ear-cutting scene,
where it is grotesquely juxtaposed with cheerful popular music. By exploring the
variety of cinematic techniques used to represent violence, the paper will seek to
explain the purpose of Tarantino’s use of violence in this film. It will be argued that
Tarantino does not aim at eliciting strong emotional reactions in the audience,
but rather, in accordance with his affinity to metafictionality and self-referentiality,
at presenting violence as a cinematic artifice that is detached from the real
life and can therefore serve as a source of aesthetic enjoyment. However, it is
precisely this way of representing violence that serves as a social commentary
by suggesting that violence is so ubiquitous in the contemporary world that the
society as a whole has become completely desensitized to it.
Ključne riječi
Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs, violence, transgression, film
Hrčak ID:
255696
URI
Datum izdavanja:
13.4.2021.
Posjeta: 847 *