¶ … Violence in Pulp Fiction
When the movie Bonnie and Clyde opened in 1967, Newsweek reviewer Joseph Morgenstern slammed the move as a "squalid shoot-em-up for the moron trade." (Goldstein) But a week later retracted his previous bad review and praised the movie. It was the violence that originally shocked the movie reviewer, but within a week, the shock of the rampant violence had worn off. Once this had happened, Mr. Morgenstern, like American society in general, came to accept that violence was acceptable in movies as an integral part of artistic expression. 27 years later, in 1994, another film was released which once again shocked critics for the violence it contained, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
In his film, Tarantino took the audience for a ride through the violent L.A. underworld complete with murders, drug overdoses, accidental shootings, and even a homosexual rape. (Tarantino 1994) While many initially panned this movie as overly violent, time has turned it into a classic of American Cinema. It is true that Pulp Fiction contains several scenes of extreme violence, but what needs to be asked is does the film use violence simply for it's shock value, or does it use...
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