SPOILER ALERT: This post contains references to Pulp Fiction which may spoil the surprise for those who haven't seen the film. There are also some naughty words which might bother prudes. The Pulp Fiction thread has bi- or tri-furcated. The narrativists are struggling with story vs. discourse, there's the homophobia thread, and a bit of po-mo speculation about intertextuality. Add a fourth thread: violence, a standard topic on this list. I would like to address the issue of homophobia, and, briefly, that of violence. Since I've been re-reading Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet recently, more or less side-by-side with Sedgwicks Epistemology of the Closet, the discussion of whether or not the film would be 'better' without a male rape scene become highly symptomatic. 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. 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. 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. This scene is not marginal to the film, which deals excessively with male pride, Butch's wounded pride which won't let him go down in the fifth round, the heritage embodied in the watch passed to him from his father's and his father's buddy's asshole (pardon the expression). The film partakes in QT's minute dissection of machismo, an analysis in which heterosexuality takes an auxilliary role. One of Helwig's astute posts summarized the issue quite well by suggesting (if I remember correctly) that the significance of the male rape should be interpreted in light of the homosocial (male) bonds which it serves to fortify. All is forgiven between the boss and his errant former lackey if that servant will keep secret the boss's "shame." The placement of the scene within that story thus presents a very clear analysis of the sources of homophobia: the phantasmatic scene of male homosexuality as a violent and violating power struggle brings to the surface everything implicit within the male power struggles AND friendships that are the film's (and QT's) constant subject. But this homosexuality (which has nothing to do with any- one's real homosexuality, but rather is tied to a homophobic phantasy of homosexuality) must be produced within the film as OUTSIDE of the male bonds and power struggles so vividly on display. If the scene seems "gratuitous," it's because this image has to be presented as beyond the pale and must function to shore up the male bonds which are so persisently under fire. That is: homophobia has more to do with the tensions within male bonds than it does with what gay men (like myself) do with each other. It is thus not marginal at all but central, yet its very appearance upsets Tarantino's whole representational system of male bonds and male feuds (the two being dangerously close). The male rape scene does indeed defuse the tension between Butch and his boss: this image of male homosexuality becomes an extreme endpoint which serves to bring even Butch's betrayal and the revenge that ensues back into the spectrum of male homosocial bonds like those between father and son (which Tarantino has quite specifically marked with an anal anxiety--through the story of the gold watch and the anxiety it clearly causes in Butch). (And it's no coincidence that the reason the Travolta and Jackson characters go on their little mission at the outset is to retrieve their boss's gold--apparently.) (Now if Tarantino were a true poet, the boss would repay Butch's brave rescue by reaching up his ass and giving Butch a gold bar he had lodged there....) On the subject of violence, these discussions constantly cluster around the issue of showing vs. saying, of the power of images vs. the need to make a moral statement (as, for instance, I believe Larson pointed out through his references to Public Enemy and the like). For me the issue revolves around the fact that an image, whatever it is, is not a statement; it has no assertive value. An image may be a phantasy, it may be entertained (like a daydream), it may be false, etc., but it does not make an assertion of the type "It is the case that..." Or "Thou shalt not...." Here the issue of homosexuality and homophobia is not irrelevant. The *image* of male rape cannot be said to make a statement, whether phobic or positive. The image (as I've tried to suggest) gives a phantasy image which serves a function within a range of relationships (by being the excluded endpoint of male social bonds). Thus I cannot agree with Fuchs when she suggests that Pulp Fiction is more about homophobia than homophobic (if that was indeed her assertion), since for me there's very little leverage for discriminating between the phobic image and any meta-level statement *about* that image. My apologies for the length of this post: it is as long (it seems) as the film on which it comments. And that is too long. --Edward R. O'Neill