New Brutality final.Qrk 20/7/05 9:14 am Page 1 Gormley The 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind of American Paul Gormley cinema, which this book calls the ‘new-brutality film.’ Violence and race have been at the heart of Hollywood cinema since its birth, but the new-brutality film was the first kind of popular American cinema to begin making this relationship explicit. The rise of this cinema coincided with the rebirth of a long-neglected strand of film theory, which seeks to unravel the complex relations of affect between the screen and the viewer. This book analyses and connects both of these developments, arguing that films like Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs, Se7en and Strange Days sought to reanimate the affective impact of white The New-Brutality Film Hollywood cinema by miming the power of African-American and particularly hip-hop culture. The book uses several films as Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema case-studies to chart these developments: • Falling Down both appropriates of the political black rage of the ‘hood film and is a transition point between the white postmodern blockbuster and the new-brutality film. Paul Gormley is Senior Lecturer and Course Tutor The New-BrutalityFilm • Gangsta films like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society for Media Studies in the provided the inspiration for much of the new-brutality film’s School of Cultural and mimesis of African-American culture. Innovation Studies at the University of East London. • The films of Quentin Tarantino (including Reservoir Dogs and He has published articles on Pulp Fiction) are new-brutality films that attempt to reanimate contemporary Hollywood the affective power of Hollywood cinema. cinema in several places including Angelaki and • Se7en, Strange Days, Fight Club and The Matrix trilogy signify both the development & the demise of the new-brutality film. Screening the City. This book charts and analyses an important period of Hollywood cinema as well as engaging with key contemporary thinkers (Deleuze, Jameson, Zizek and Benjamin) in a strikingly innova- tive fashion. The work will appeal to dedicated film scholars, critical theorists and readers with a general interest in film. intellect ISBN 1-84150-119-0 intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE United Kingdom intellect www.intellectbooks.com 9 781841 501192 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 1 The New-Brutality Film Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema Paul Gormley intellect™ Bristol, UK Portland, OR, USA gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 2 First Published in the UK in 2005 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First Published in the USA in 2005 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA Copyright ©2005 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-926-4 / ISBN 1-84150-119-0 Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Julie Strudwick Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd. gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 3 Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction Torturous Cinema: Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New-Brutality Film 43 Chapter One Naïve Imitations: Falling Down, the Crisis of the Action-Image and Cynical Realism 73 Chapter Two Gangsters and Gangstas: Boyz N the Hood, and the Dangerous Black Body 99 Chapter Three Gangsters and Gangstas Part Two: Menace II Society and the Cinema of Rage 137 Chapter Four Miming Blackness: Reservoir Dogs and ‘American Africanism’ 159 Chapter Five Trashing Whiteness: Pulp Fiction, Se7en, Strange Days and Articulating Affect 183 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 203 Filmography 207 Index Contents 3 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 4 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 5 Acknowledgements Although there are always too many people to thank in a project of this size, the following people deserve particular mention for their intellectual stimulus, and other support over the various stages of completion: John Beasley-Murray, The School of Cultural and Media Studies and Social Sciences and my Urban Film students at the University of East London, Haim Bresheeth, Jessica Edwards, Natalia Garcia, Jane Gaines and the Literature Programme at Duke University, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew and Jessica Grierson, Laura Mulvey, Mica Nava, Luciana Parisi, Elaine Pennicott, Greg Santori, Ashwani Sharma, Mark Shiel, Sophy Smith and her family, Andrew Sneddon, Tiziana Terranova, Carol Watts, Paul Whelan, Nick Wilson - and my family. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Eileen Gormley (1947-1982). Acknowledgements 5 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 6 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 7 Introduction Torturous Cinema: Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New- Brutality Film One of the most striking scenes in 1990s’ US cinema is filmed in ten minutes of real time and centres on a gangster’s apparently meaningless mutilation of a cop in a disused warehouse. The infamous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino 1991) begins with a fixed shot of the gangster, Mr Blonde, sat on an abandoned hearse, and the cop tied to a chair in the centre of the room. From the cop’s point of view, we see Blonde jump from his perch, with the sinister enunciation, ‘alone at last’. As Blonde advances towards the cop, the shots start switching vigorously between both points of view, and we know that some sort of sadistic violence is about to ensue. After some verbal taunting, and the restless circular movement of the camera, the violence begins with a sudden slap to the cop’s already swollen face. This blow is made more unsettling for the viewer, by a sudden switch in the camera’s point of view which gives the effect of Blonde’s outstretched hand coming towards the audience. The film then cuts to another shot of the gangster, standing behind the cop’s head and gagging him with some sticky masking tape. As he silences the cop, Blonde makes the horrifying comment, ‘I don’t give a good fuck what you know or don’t know, but I’m going to torture you anyway’. The gangster then pulls out his gun on a horrified cop, vainly struggling to escape the line of fire, and we know that knowledge or reason has no power to save the cop from the impending violence. This is echoed in the viewer’s relationship to the scene. The bout of violence has no real narrative logic beyond the fact that we have been told by another member of the gang that Blonde is a ‘fucking madman’, and this lack of narrative cause and effect leaves the viewer without a clue as to what happens next. The camera cuts to a close-up of Blonde’s boot as he lifts it on to a table to pull out a razor, asking the bizarre question, ‘Ever listen to K. Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies?’ The film then zooms in on the cop’s beaten and anguished face, before it cuts back to Blonde dancing around him. Suddenly, Blonde lunges at the cop and the viewer with the razor. The changes in point of view become more frenetic, as the gangster sits on the cop’s knee, and begins to slice his ear off with the razor. The camera then pans away, leaving the actual disembodiment unseen - although the acousmatic sounds of the cop’s muffled cries of pain leave us with the impression of being visually present throughout the mutilation. Blonde then moves Introduction back into the frame, and while considering the organ, he alludes to the self- reflexive, sadistic and masochistic overtones of the scene with the question, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’1 7 gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 8 After this torturous sequence, the viewer might reasonably expect some period of respite, with a cut away to another scene, but the film stays with Blonde, following him to his car. This escape outside of the claustrophobic confines of the warehouse is only temporary as the camera tracks the gangster, petrol container in hand, back into the building. In a slow tracking shot, he dances his way around the cop, to the sounds of Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You.’ The cuts between shots suddenly increase their pace, as Blonde begins to drench the cop with gasoline. The liquid also splatters the camera, threatening to splash through the boundary between screen and viewer. Finally the gangster pulls out a Zippo lighter, to torch the cop alive, when suddenly his chest explodes in a mass of red, with the sound of gunshots puncturing the soundtrack. The shot then cuts to the source of this gunfire, another, previously unconscious member of the gang, firing at Blonde, until the camera circles slowly around to Blonde as he slowly falls to the floor. This particular scene contains a number of the features which mark the emergence of a new strand of Hollywood cinema in the 1990s, which I call in this book, the ‘new-brutality’ film. These films all signified a change in aesthetic - a new aesthetic direction in Hollywood film. Reservoir Dogs, Falling Down (Schumacher 1992), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino 1994), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), Se7en (Fincher 1995) are all new-brutality films, and the one feature that they all share in common is their attempt to renegotiate and reanimate the immediacy and affective qualities of the cinematic experience within commercial Hollywood.