to respond to ed o'neill's smart post on pulp fiction, spoilers included.... this will be long.... > Part of homophobia is the wish > to make homosexuality simply disappear. Preferring not to see gay sex, > preferring to leave it behind a closed door like the ominous one QT > gives us, is part and parcel of homophobia, not simply a question of > aesthetics or taste. Ditto those who insist that the spectator can't > imagine what's going on behind that closed door, and thus that "Butch" > doesn't know his former boss whom he's cheated is being raped. Just > the redneck accents (in an LA pawnshop?) and the SM gear should be a > big clue, if only in terms of the Hollywood coding of homosexuality. this is an important point, and sort of what i think i might have imagined when i said that the rape was a surprise to those who hadn't seen enough movies. metaphorically, i was meaning (obliquely, i grant) that the invisibility of the rape-coming-up is a function of some middling, culturally conditioned denial. as ed rightly points out, the cues are all there before the door opens and we see this rape-scene. that the scene is a kind of "unimaginable" horror, or "the worst imaginable" horror is also to the point of this "invisibility": that the film presents it as a climax--the payoff for uncomfortably waiting for a joke (as much of the film works--horror becomes a joke, because [?] this is how to contain, mediate, and otherwise imagine horrible imagery [cf. marvin's head blown off becomes a joke, and the fact that marvin is black is connected, i think to rhames/marsellus' rape....more on this to follow]). so the zipperhead prisoner allows a certain chuckling as the viewers might be anticipating the climax of the scene. It's also difficult to accept the position of writers who insist that > this rape only stands in for some unredeemable and excruciating form of > violence and that any violence would do just as well. Such responses > fail to take heed of the images the text gives us by substituting the > specific for the general (not anal rape but merely violence). This IS > the image the film presents, and thus must be accounted for in terms of > the film and the tensions it symptomatises. agreed again. i think "symptomatizes" is a good way to think of this, rather than my previous term, "interrogates," which i also agree with ed, sort of grants the film (if not tarantino, though i see him or what he thinks he's doing [and he's talked abt it a lot, cf. oliver stone or spike lee explaining their work for "us"], as less important here than what the film is doing, in various ways). the choice of the rape scene, specifically the choice of a black man being raped, and saved, by white men, is to the point of the power dynamics being symptomatized. and this gets to my understanding/reading of the multiple demonizations and anxieties at work here. willis/butch is not raped. marsellus is. while this leads to the "bonding" of marsellus and butch by way of the secret they share, it's not just their secret, it's ours. so one question is how the film invites us to collude in this secret, to laugh at it ("i'm gonna get medieval on your ass" serves as a punchline?, one which, as ed observes, goes back to the watch story's punchline, and that story is very much abt racism, as walken intones the names of the dupes, "slopes" and "gooks," etc.). this allows the audience to get bond but also "get" its tenuousness, black-white male bonding over a black man's rape? historical resonances don't begin to cover the problems raised here. here's a guess: i think that the desire for defined difference which frames heterosexuality as a construct and that is worried in homosexuality is sort of displaced in the racial difference here. marsellus and butch both "become" "niggers" to the rednecks (and where is the audience positioned here?) but it's marsellus who "becomes" womanized. and this is where i think the rape functions not only as a display of heterosexist anxiety, but also sexist and racist anxiety. (this) rape makes its victims "less than men," or "women," or "niggers." > I find the very idea of saying that gay male sex is 'simply' the most > awful thing imaginable itself an awful comment. It is by such tactics > that the fact that male homosexuality (even in this parodic absurd form) > DOES appear in the film becomes hardly worth mentioning. The homophobia > is not exactly in the film itself, but rather (or also) in how this > phantasy of homosexuality is made insignificant in critical commentary. again, i think this is important to underline. nothing seems simple here, the absurdity escalates the stakes, and as it's followed up by tarantino as the character who refers repeatedly to "dead niggers," there's a continuum of absurdity, (imagistic as well as literal) overkill, and emblem of straightwhitemale anxieties. this is not to say that the tarantino character (jimmie, married to a black woman, bonnie) is "simply" a joke version of racism and hyper-straight-masculinity, but that again, he's symptomatic. to marginalize the rape scene because other emotional payoffs come in the "bonnie situation" scenes, or even in vincent/travolta's previous murder by butch (as vincent emerges from the bathroom, elvira madigan in hand) seems to miss the connections between guy violence and bonding which the film specifies. connections which have everything to do with how homosexuality is imagined in a homophobic way, in the film, in the culture. that is, if the tension between butch/marsellus is defused, as ed suggests, it is also left as a problem (despite the "grace" butch rides off on) for the audience: the tension is only defused through extreme and disturbing means, which are certainly not about resolution, but more running away, more not dealing, more anxieties repressed but also briefly visible. i'm aware that this "problem" (as i've termed it) is probably not going to linger for some audience members, that the "how was your breakfast?" seems to make everything all right (butch is a spouse-beater but he loves her really, marsellus is a scary black man but he's got a terrible secret that undoes sweetback's running out of *his* own movie, uncaught and virile), but i think there's enough left unresolved that there are possibilities for thought...though i'll add that jules' redemption is a moral coda that bugs me, as grand and wonderful as jackson is in his performance. on violence, and showing vs saying: i'm less than easy with the idea that there's a difference. moral framing, a la public enemy (the movie) or beavis & butt-head (their arch "don't try this at home" in response to being called on whatever modelling some people seem to see them doing), or even jules' desire to be a "shepherd" at the end of pulp fiction--this framing is so overt and so "hokey." i rather doubt there's AN answer here, but certainly the circulation of images and moral framings seems unfixed, especially in the rape scene and its apparent emotional fallouts (in and out of the movie). the messiness of such imagery seems to the point of the messiness of the anxieties it reflects/provokes/disguises. cindy