ABSTRACT
Some news on the Internet from Vancouver:
The next day I went to the movie, Pulp Fiction. The movie, although a kick—it is largely a rapturous ode to the joys of injecting coke—is vilely homophobic. There is a scene where two of the movie’s main characters, a small-time hood and the crime boss he’s crossed are interrupted in their chase to kill each other, bound and gagged. They are hostages to a couple of gay S & M freaks. The crime boss is trussed over a gymnast’s horse and fucked in the bum. We see this, more or less, after the hood, played by Bruce Willis, left in the antechamber to the torture room, frees himself. Hearing the screams of his adversary, instead of leaving his deadly enemy to his situation, he decides to rescue him. It’s when the door flings open that we see the ‘torture’ whose victim’s anguished screams we’ve only heard until now. This awful torture is, as I’ve already revealed, a little anal penetration. A scene more or less like a Tom of Finland drawing—except for the withdrawal of the passive actor’s consent. Pause for a second to ask what, in the fiction of Pulp Fiction, could have motivated the Bruce Willis character to risk his own life to save someone he otherwise wanted dead? It must be that the screams from the torture room struck deep instinctual and cultural chords in him. The horror of anal penetration threatened worse for him than the loss of his life, the loss of masculine identity. As they dispatch the homosexual sadists together—by shooting them in the balls—heterosexual bonding is restored at a deep level and a peace is struck, revealing another level of the character’s ‘humanity’. Murdering queers and the satisfaction that brings is the ground on which the characters establish their truce.
In an inverted sort of way, to carry this further, the S & M sadists are quite incidental. They are surrogates to act out the suppressed passion the men have for each other (which has led them to want to kill each other) and their murder of the queers is a kind of rite by which they take the passage back from the dark chamber where they’ve made love to [the] world of light and men. 1
