[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 148 (Wednesday, November 30, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: November 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     THE EFFECTS OF MEDIA VIOLENCE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, for years I have worked to sensitize 
the entertainment industry to the damaging effects of media violence. 
Many researchers, industry leaders, and journalists have joined me in 
this effort. Joe Urschel of USA Today recently wrote a piece, ``Playing 
Violence just for Laughs,'' calling for greater industry sensitivity 
and responsibility. He writes about the popular movie ``Pulp Fiction,'' 
in which violence is no longer just gratuitous or shocking, but is 
played for laughs. Urschel recognizes the director's creative freedom 
to make his movies the way he wants, but he points out that while moral 
culpability may not exist in the fantasy worlds they create, it does in 
the world they live in. We have seen progress but clearly we must 
continue our efforts. I ask that the USA Today article be printed in 
the Record at this point.
  The article follows:

                    Playing Violence Just for Laughs


        ``pulp fiction'' is disturbing for its brazen depravity

       Sadly, you cannot always believe what you read.
       ``A work of such depth, wit and blazing originality''--The 
     New York Times.
       ``Quite simply, the most exhilarating piece of 
     filmmaking''--Entertainment Weekly.
       ``Ferocious fun . . . damn near a work of art''--Rolling 
     Stone.
       ``Bursts out of its bindings with loopy delights!''--USA 
     Today.
       These are the words of film critics writing for some of the 
     largest and most influential publications in the country. 
     They are celebrating the release of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp 
     Fiction, a movie in which violence is no longer just 
     gratuitous, no longer just for shock, no longer just for some 
     sort of twisted cinematic ``artistic effect.''
       In Pulp Fiction, violence is for laughs.
       You can forget about trying to reform the Hollywood 
     industry that produces the most profitable television and 
     movie products in the world. Like contemporary tobacco chiefs 
     who deny any link between cigarettes and cancer, Hollywood 
     executives will still be sitting before congressional 
     committees 10 years from now in adamant denial.
       They will continue to callously brush off the connections 
     between their products and the violence in society--despite 
     an avalanche of scientific studies showing the connection.
       Unlike the tobacco industry, however, Hollywood has a 
     powerful coterie of sycophants and enablers in the press who 
     wrap this craven merchandising in the cloak of artistic 
     expression and try to elevate it to the level of something 
     holy and good.
       While Pulp Fiction may not be the most violent movie to 
     come along, or the most profane, it is certainly both. But 
     what should disturb anyone who sees it--especially those who 
     are judging it for others--is its brazen depravity.
       This is a movie about a collection of morons who move 
     through life dispassionately executing the guilty and the 
     innocent. The movie doesn't show you this to make you loathe 
     these people or their actions. It doesn't rub your nose in 
     this violence to make you hate it. It does this to make you 
     laugh.
       Everything is a loose, high-schoolish joke in Pulp Fiction. 
     It doesn't just mock our sense of revulsion at off-handed, 
     unconscionable murder. It plays rape, sadomasochism, cocaine, 
     heroin injections, drug overdoses, Vietnam POWs, the Bible 
     and anything else it encounters for laughs as well.
       The biggest gag in the movie occurs when John Travolta's 
     gun discharges and inadvertently blows the head off a kid in 
     the back of his car. A laugh riot ensues while our lovable 
     protagonists have to clean up the car by picking skull pieces 
     off the seats and mopping up pools of blood on the floor.
       What depth! What exhilaration!
       Why is it that when the latest street atrocity is 
     committed--an 11-year-old casually executed by friends, an 
     elderly couple killed for their car, kids at a pool sprayed 
     with gunfire--we are repulsed and alarmed, but when similarly 
     horrific acts are depicted on the screen, we celebrate them 
     as art?
       This isn't to deny Quentin Tarantino the right to make his 
     movies any way he wants. Nor is it to deny that there is 
     craftmanship and skill in his work.
       But something not worth doing is not worth doing well. And 
     while filmmakers may create extraordinary fantasy worlds in 
     which there is no moral culpability, they do not live in 
     one.

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