Violence as a Form of Social Criticism in Transgressive Art: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs

Contemporary art often aims at criticizing the modern society and its values and in transgressive art this is usually done through the use of violence, which is represented graphically and matter-of-factly. The films of Quentin Tarantino are highly transgressive in that respect, and his debut film Reservoir Dogs is even thought to have initiated a whole new era in the American cinema commonly known as ‘the new brutality’. Reservoir Dogs helped the American filmmaker establish his characteristic ‘tarantinoesque’ style in which violence – excessive, graphic, and even aestheticized – plays a crucial role. This paper will examine the violence in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs focusing on its nature, its various types and manifestations, the way it is represented and the purpose of such representation. Violence in Reservoir Dogs is omnipresent: it lingers throughout the whole film and dictates its narration to reach its peak in the infamous ear-cutting scene, where it is grotesquely juxtaposed with cheerful popular music. By exploring the variety of cinematic techniques used to represent violence, the paper will seek to explain the purpose of Tarantino’s use of violence in this film. It will be argued that Tarantino does not aim at eliciting strong emotional reactions in the audience, but rather, in accordance with his affinity to metafictionality and self-referentiality, at presenting violence as a cinematic artifice that is detached from the real life and can therefore serve as a source of aesthetic enjoyment. However, it is precisely this way of representing violence that serves as a social commentary by suggesting that violence is so ubiquitous in the contemporary world that the society as a whole has become completely desensitized to it