This thesis examines the critical response to Quentin Tarantino’s representations of screen violence, primarily the violent content in his three revenge thrillers: Kill Bill (2003-4), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained (2012). Throughout Tarantino’s career, critics have attacked him for aestheticizing bloodshed to such a degree that it becomes a glib, pop culture affectation, and the empirically larger amounts of violent content in the revenge thrillers has only encouraged this claim. This paper argues for a recontextualization of how Tarantino wields brutality throughout these three pictures, that the rise in graphic content reflects a greater engagement with social-moral concerns in a manner that is both socially responsible – to echo Susan Sontag’s views on visual representations of violence in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) – and creatively consistent among those artists looking to retain their cultural significance as they age.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-1585 |
| Date | 15 April 2014 |
| Creators | Katz, Joshua |
| Publisher | VCU Scholars Compass |
| Source Sets | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | © The Author |
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