It seems to me that one of the many important differences between Reservoir Dogs and Naked is that Naked makes the audience complicit in the violence by establishing sympathy for Johnny. The characters in Dogs are presented as it were in quotation marks and the violence in the film is tagged in various ways as a filmic effect (the "watch your head" sign that we see while the famous ear is being severed works this way). I'm not suggesting that Naked gives us real people and real violence, but that it breaks down the irony that Dogs insists on. Dogs works like the Godard films of the mid 60s, a period when Godard was saying things like "its not blood, its red." The violence in Naked, and indeed the film itself, does not want to tarry at the level of the signifier but aims at signifieds and even referents. Its power, and the power of DT's performance, is that we come to see a vicious sociopath's suffering and we come to like him. His violence is not so different in kind from our own. In dogs the violence is anothers, the signifiers of societies, but it is never related to our own violence. Thus we can see Dogs and feel gleeful after, as after a bull fight, where as Naked provokes an affect that is far harder to endure, but finally much more important. lgs