Unfortunately I haven't seen _Reservoir Dogs_, so I can't comment on much of Louis' analysis. Incidentally, apparently _RD_ has been banned on video in the UK, so has therefore become something of a cult film, playing every weekend or so at a cinema in Leicester Square. However, I would very much like to hear more on _Naked_, and offer a couple of comments: > 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. "complicit" is clearly a loaded word here. I felt that, for me at least, my sympathy with Johnny was very much attenuated, and I'm not even sure if that is the right word. We don't even really achieve much understanding of Johnny's motives--whatever those may be. He is very much "exteriorized"--unlike, for example, Travis Bickle (sp?) in _Taxi Driver_. Indeed, (and perhaps _pace_ the differentiation Louis sets up between _RD_ and _Naked_), Johnny's predominant *linguistic* mode is clearly irony: both mocking and self-deprecating. The most sympathetic moment for Johnny himself is when he says "fuck off" to his ex-girlfriend. The film resists an attempt to scavenge around under this irony to find a truer *verbal* expression of Johnny's character. Moreover, while it would be easy to suggest that his identity is constituted in his physicality, or his physical violence towards women, his ease with words is clearly also of paramount importance, and in some kind of relation to this (noxious) physicality and corporeality. This in itself constitutes some kind of irony: after all, he is very funny at times, and not least when he is most brutally caustic and depressing--ie. when his words are at their most violent. I realize that I am to some extent re-defining the term "irony" here, and thus moving the goalposts, but so be it. > I'm not > suggesting that Naked gives us real people and real violence, but that it > breaks down the irony that Dogs insists on. > 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. This last is definitely the case, but I'm not sure if it follows from what precedes it. First, I'm not sure what Louis means about not tarrying at the level of the signifier: as I suggest above, I think Johnny (and we) delight in linguistic play enabled by the instability of the signifier detatched from signified. Second, I wonder how much we ever are interested in "a vicious sociopath's suffering." This would suggest some kind of tragic hero: and indeed, I am very interested in the status of _Naked_ as tragedy, but it seems a socialized tragedy rather than an individuated one, although the film seems ambiguous on this score (as the slight suggestion of Johnny as Christ underlines). It is the move to socialized tragedy that I saw as the connection between this and Edward Bond. > 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. I wonder what Louis means by this. Again, my literary link with Bond would suggest a formulation such as a "refusal of catharsis", but I would also want to link this idea back to the suggestion of complicity with which Louis began his analysis. > lgs Jon