J Roberson writes: "I don't think Tarantino is just out to yank our chains. After thinking about it a bit, I don't remember the characters discussing race and sex too much. . .it just *is*. ..maybe that's his point, or rather, maybe his point is that if you just let it be and get on with your life, however you decide to, things will be better - not an argument for sitting back and not changing things, but an argument for doing what you will do without tripping out over what culture you're in, how to deal with a partner of another race, etc. . ." "it just *is* . . . " *Precisely*, but only within in the context of the movie. There are people's private lives, there are private lives as presented by films and other media, but the two are not parallel. Private lives on film are always part of a discourse, a re-presentation of some *kind* of reality. Now, since I'm not at all sure that we are to interpret PF as anything but a *fictional* "reality," the lives that we see depicted are being presented--offered, as it were for our inspection. Yet all of the issues revolving around these lives (race, sadism--homosexual or otherwise, drugs, etc.) are so loaded with cultural connotations that I'm quite sure QT knows they will stir up the kind of discussion seen on this net. And that's what I mean by "yanking our chains." QT is, like Hitchcock, keenly aware of how to manipulate an audience, but his brand of manipulation veers somewhat farther into the social realm than Hitchcock's did. This doesn't mean that he (like Hitchcock) might not have some interesting or even important things to "say." I just don't think that those things are a form of social discourse that announces, say, "Race is important" or "Race is unimportant." Perhaps it "says" something like, "I'm going portray race in certain ways that will provoke some kind of reaction from you, *because* race is coonsidered to be important in our society, regardless of what any given individual might think." In this way, I see QT not as a preacher (like Oliver Stone) but as a lab technician (if not a scientist), dispassionately experimenting with his subjects (us, the viewers). --Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN