Consequences Of Failure In Taste-Based Accounting Include Terrorism, Columbine

The normally sane & rational Gregg Easterbrook goes off the deep end on the subject of Kill Bill. The gist: he doesn’t like Quentin Tarantino, the ontological fact of Quentin Tarantino is itself a sinister Hollywood conspiracy, and – a coup de grace I’m always tickled to see – violent films are contributing to a rise in terrorism. Yikes! (He even strays perilously close to Godwin’s Law in the concluding paragraph. [But Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply to blogs! -ed.] Hmph. If it’s ever amended, there’d better be a clause about ripping off Mickey Kaus.)

If he (Easterbrook) can get all this kind of thing out of his system in blog form and still produce the excellent TMQ, it’ll be well worth it. Still, a bit of a shocker from the man with the mysterious double G.

UPDATE (10/17): Backblog is in the process of not working, damn them, so I’ll chime in here. This should be comment #6 below:

My reference to Godwin’s Law above was about the assertion that Jews should be especially opposed to violence in films because of, you know, the Holocaust. It’s an absurd thing to say, although no more absurd than the rest of the piece. Not to say Easterbrook has to like the film, but he does seem to be going over the top a tiny bit. (A tangent: there’s a chapter in – drumroll, please – Jon Ronson’s Them which discusses the ironic founding of so-called “Jewish Hollywood” on the profits from such films as the feelgood Klan extravaganza Birth Of A Nation. I have now demonstrated my ability to bring Jon Ronson’s Them into virtually any discussion on virtually any subject. You’re welcome.)

Actually, the criticism of Tarantino that I’ve never understood is that he doesn’t do characters, or that his films are “pure junk” (Easterbrook) or “about nothing but degradation” (Lileks) – a criticism I would have levelled at the interminable Requiem For A Dream long before Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown or… well, OK, I’ll give you Kill Bill, whose greatest fault is that it genuinely doesn’t have any characters. I thought the scene Lileks disliked so much, where the girl watches Thurman kill her mother, was one of the best in the movie (the others featured Sonny Chiba) precisely because it was the only time Thurman’s killing spree was presented as something awful. It made me uncomfortable, in the way that these things should. The rest is just ballet. And like the man says, some people don’t like dance sequences in movies.

MORE UPDATE (10/18): Goddammit. Now Easterbrook has apparently been fired by ESPN. This is annoying.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2003 at 15:22 by olly and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.