Once Upon a Time in Tarantino-Occupied Carnage: A Study of the Aesthetic Affectations and the Moral Dilemmas Powering Violence in the Revenge Cinema of Quentin Tarantino

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Katz, Joshua

Contributors dc:contributor

• Richard Fine

• Violence
• Tarantino
• Kill Bill
• Django Unchained
• Inglourious Basterds
• Quentin Tarantino
• Arts and Humanities
• English Language and Literature

Statement dc:rights

• © The Author

Identifier

https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/586

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-1585