Savage Pleasures

...The great pleasure comes from sexually humiliating her...

...So who will be my next gangsta bitch...

...In the midst of Lucy's clowning, it never made sense to ask why she was so fearful of Ricky's disapproval, and in the cleaningup scene from Pulp Fiction, we also don't worry about deeper questions...

...0 400 • DISSENT...

...But in the 1990s the return of the savage pleasures is not simply the reflection of a frustrated underclass caught up in hard times...

...The core of the movie is what happens after the two hit men accidentally murder someone who doublecrossed their boss...

...Ruthless as hit men, Vincent and Jules are total flops at cleaning up...

...This year a contestant on the Jenny Jones Show went home and murdered another contestant who he felt had humiliated him...

...We are free to remain voyeurs, hidden from sight, shielded from pity and terror...

...The home version of Mortal Kombat is milder, but for suburban kids who have had their taste for violence whetted by viewing the original in arcades, it is sill a turn-on...

...What draws us to O.J.'s trial is the savage pleasure of watching a rich and powerful man fight to stay out of prison, coupled with the corresponding sense that whatever he has done is so particular to his life that it does not threaten us personally...

...The scene that follows is driven by the need for Vincent and Jules to get themselves and their car washed before Jimmie's wife returns from work Jimmie insists she will divorce him if she finds evidence of a dead body in the house...

...In contrast to the traditional talk shows of Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, in which guests often reveal aspects of their personal lives that are kinky or painful, on the new confrontational television shows guests are pitted against one another...

...This year Alabama will reintroduce the chain gang, Mississippi its infamous striped prison uniforms, and in state after state financially pressed legislatures are coming up with the money needed to pay for executing criminals—$3.2 million per execution in Florida, an estimated $118 million overall in New York...

...But these days, the only sorts of regulations we seem interested in are those designed to keep welfare mothers and the poor out of sight...

...The national championship claim may have been hyperbole, but what theASPCA agents found when they entered the theater was no local cockfight intended for neighborhood aficionados...

...She's gone now so it's time to make the switch...

...I caught her with a looping right hook to the back of her SUMMER • 1995 • 397 Notebook head and whoomp, down she went...

...Outside the courthouse her supporters sold buttons that read, "Lorena Bobbitt for Surgeon General," and by the time she was acquitted, she had been transformed by those who sided with her from a desperate woman brutally reacting to a brutal marriage to a triumphant symbol of female rage—a wife who did to her husband what more women ought to do...

...Fredia Gibbs, the women's super lightweight kickboxing champion of the world, told reporters after winning her title before ten thousand fans at the San Jose Arena in California...

...None of the savage pleasures would have appealed so widely in the SUMMER • 1995 • 399 Notebook atmosphere of liberalism that was central toAmerican life through the late 1960s...

...A dog with a good record in fighting can even be an investment...

...Standing there naked, they are like children who have gotten themselves so covered with mud that they cannot be allowed in the house to shower...

...Its rules are minimal...

...More commonly in gangsta rap it is not enough to use and then walk away from a woman...

...Its breakthrough hate record, "One in a Million," came out in 1989 and targeted blacks, gays, and immigrants with lyrics that declared: Don't need to buy none of your gold chains today...

...I wanna see you bleed...

...She is one of the lucky ones...

...Their transformation is now complete...

...Even more significant, talk television, especially in the daytime, has gone from conversation to confrontation...

...Rat-a-tat and a tat like that Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back So advises the popular rapper Dr...

...But what is surprising is that there have not been more such incidents...

...Most people seem to have made up their minds about Simpson's guilt or innocence already...

...Among white rock bands with large followings, Guns N' Roses has long been notorious for its hate lyrics...

...To date the gender line has not been crossed in the Ultimate Fighting Championships, but that may not be for long...

...In the nation's capital it takes place throughout the inner city on a frequent basis...

...Neighbors around the Bronx theater said for years it was always possible to tell when a cockfight was held...

...Anything, except biting and eye-gouging, is allowed...

...The savage pleasures are also part of a middle-class culture at home with everything from S&M bulletin boards on the Internet to Rush Limbaugh talking about feminazis...

...Pit bull pups now sell for as much as $500...

...Immigrants and faggots They make no sense to me...

...The ninety birds, too violent to be turned loose on a farm, all had to be destroyed...

...The ASPCA's March raid was an eerie reminder of the nineteenth-century New York Luc Sante describes in Low Life...

...On confrontation television a Geraldo Rivera, a Sally Jessy Raphael, a Jerry Springer will have an unfaithful husband and wife plus their lovers as guests, and the show will revolve around the parties baiting each other...

...In 1994, when a battered Lorena Bobbitt was put on trial for cutting off her husband's penis, she immediately received the support of feminists concerned with the rights of abused women...

...The film consists of three related stories involving a Los Angeles drug boss and his two hit men, Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson...

...Cause I don't feel shit It's only rhythm that I ride The only love I got is psychopathic homicide Ageneration ago, when the civil rights movement still offered hope, rap music could not have won the popularity it has now...

...At this point it is impossible to imagine Vincent and Jules as brutal hit men, just as it is finally impossible to feel upset about the murder, rape, and drug dealing that underlie virtually every scene in Pulp Fiction...

...The ASPCA agents found twenty birds already dead from the night's fighting and ninety more locked in cages...

...But at the trial any sense that Lorena Bobbitt's violence had to be seen in perspective vanished...

...So far nobody has been killed, but the fights, in which contestants wear neither gloves nor protective equipment, are predictably bloody...

...Two men are put in a ring and are allowed to fight until one submits or is rendered unconscious...

...A fighter can be hit while lying on the canvas, and since there are no rounds or time limits, the accumulated damage from any one fight can be enormous...

...Their final humiliation comes when they must take off all their clothes and be hosed down by Jimmie...

...They come to our country— and think they'll do as they please Like start some mini-Iran or spread some fuckin' disease...

...We need only ask how the O.J...

...For black women—"hos" and "bitches" in nineties rap—the judgments are even harsher...

...In the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the rap music that has gotten the most attention from the mainstream media has been that of rappers like Ice-T, whose song "Cop Killer" includes the chorus: COP KILLER, it's better you than me...

...To make matters worse, since the decade began, even the counterculture has played a role in the rise of the savage pleasures...

...American Gladiators, a syndicated show that features men and women competing weekly in contests ranging from the "Joust" (a battle with pugel sticks on a platform twenty feet above the ground) to "Breakthrough and Conquer" (a combination of football and sumo wrestling) has become a major hit as a result of its ability to persuade viewers that they are getting an updated version of the arena games of old Rome...

...The dogs, pit bulls bred for strength and aggressiveness, are turned loose in fights in which money, drugs, cars, or simply social status are the prize...

...The morning after there were dozens of dead roosters lying in the street, razorsharp spurs still attached to their feet...

...What we get instead, as film critic Sarah Kerr pointed out, is the sort of situation comedy television routinely supplies...

...COP KILLER, fuck police brutality...

...The result will be accusations that stop just short of violence, but violence will always be in the air, and the show's winner is invariably the guest who can put the others in the worst light...

...When they get dressed, it is not in the funereal black suits they wore when they did the killing but in swimming trunks and T-shirts Jimmie lends them...

...Inside, in an area the size of a football field, was parking space for the 289 spectators who had paid $20 each for admission...

...It is not the pathos of the trial—the death of a young mother and an aspiring actor—that moves us...

...Aided by thirty New York police, a dozen ASPCA agents swooped down on a converted movie theater in the Bronx and broke up an event billed as the "National Championship Cockfight...

...For martial arts fans, the newest entertainment is a pay-per-view television extravaganza, the Ultimate Fighting Championship...

...The film's savage pleasures supply not only the violence we see, but the laughter used to undermine any moral revulsion we might feel about it...

...If there is an end in sight for all this violence, it is hard to see...

...Network television is doing its best to make ersatz combat a regular feature...

...On the fringes is the vigilantism of a group like Dead Serious, an anti-crime organization in Dallas, Texas, that promises members a $5,000 cash reward if they kill someone while being robbed or attacked...

...They worry that without Lava soap they are not really going to get the blood off their hands, and they bicker over who is going to wipe the blood off their car's windows versus who is going to get the brain matter out of the back seat...

...So far, rat baiting hasn't made a comeback, but along with cockfighting, dog fighting has...

...Indeed, if anything dominates the 1990s focus on law and order, it is the brutality it has sanctioned...

...They go to the hospital...

...Every time a highly publicized bout was announced clergymen rushed to deliver sermons denouncing it...

...They were savage and bitter," Nathanael West writes of the lower-middle class crowd that riots at the end of his Great Depression novella The Day of the Locust...

...They have been turned from bad-asses into "dorks," as Jimmie puts it...

...Her mind said get up, but her legs said for what...

...The savage pleasures are back and in a big way...

...quickly became the rallying cry of Vietnam War protesters, but these days the counterculture's rallying cry has all too often been a thinly disguised eye for an eye...

...At least her boyfriend is willing to let her go...

...During the 1960s "Make love, not war...

...They throw punches that send animated blood flying, tear out a heart by hand, and in one case rip off an opponent's head and hold it up with the spinal cord dangling from it...

...Outside there were cameras and lookout guards stationed on roofs...

...Nor is it the search for truth...

...COP KILLER, I know your family's grievin' (FUCK 'EM) COP KILLER, but tonight we get even...

...Typical is 2 Live Crew in "The Fuck Shop": Let me fill you with somethin milky and white `Cause I'm gonna slay you rough and painful...

...Or Just Ice with this warning: Don't try to get too close And try to kiss and hug me Start to caress me, then say you love me...

...A show would begin with Lucy doing something silly, like getting her finger stuck in a bowling ball, and the rest of the half hour would revolve around Lucy hiding her predicament from Ricky...

...For those interested in the savage pleasures, it is not, however, necessary to come up with the $50 a game like Mortal Kombat can cost...

...But what has been the most significant about the violence of the black rap music of the 1990s is the degree to which its anger has been turned inward...

...Sante notes that in 1875, admission to dog fights and cockfights ran as high as $2 but that the real moneymaker was rat baiting, in which a fox terrier was put in a pit of rats and bets were made on how many the terrier could kill in a half hour...

...In 1994 six million Mortal Kombat videos were sold, and in stores like Toys "R" Us, the game and others like it have become standard items...

...But much more mainstream is the kind of thinking that in the midst of cries for smaller government and lower taxes has made us willing to spend $30 billion a year on prison construction and maintenance...

...Crossbred with pheasants for aggressiveness, given steroids to build their muscles, and injected with angel dust to deaden the pain of fighting, the birds—with values of anywhere between $1,000 and $10,000—were unfit to do anything but kill one another...

...A century ago prize fighting was outlawed in a majority of the forty-four states...

...It is, however, in pop music that the counterculture has done the most in recent years to legitimize the savage pleasures...

...What has made the savage pleasures a force to be reckoned with in the 1990s is not an America on a joy ride but an America in which a common culture built on shared values has been overwhelmed by compassion fatigue...

...West's description of a crowd taking its frustrations out in violence speaks to the traditional notion of savage pleasures as an outlet for the deprived...

...Simpson murder trial has become the leading news event, sports event, and entertainment event of the decade...

...It is an episode that at first seems filled with irony—a brutal murder juxtaposed against the need to achieve the appearance of normalcy...

...Dre in a lyric that all but says that to preserve their "reps" young black men shouldn't hesitate to kill each other...

...the narrator of Apache's "Gangsta Bitch" asks after his gun-toting girlfriend is hauled off to jail...

...It is no longer enough to have an unfaithful husband and wife talking to a therapist about what has driven them apart...

...The new Victorians are not prepared to bring back public hanging, but they have been willing to make the law more savage, 398 • DISSENT Notebook more publicly theatrical, than at any time since the 1950s...

...This year, for the first time in its sixty-eight-year history, women entered New York's Golden Gloves Boxing Tournament, and in the much deadlier sport of kickboxing, women have become featured performers, quickly adapting themselves to the violence of the ring...

...In video arcades across the country the hottest game is Mortal Kombat, a video that features characters vying for the title of world's championship street fighter...

...The calls for a return to Victorianism that conservatives like Newt Gingrich and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb have recently voiced promise to leave the savage pleasures intact...

...The figures in Mortal Kombat, who look more as if they stepped out of a photograph than a cartoon, don't just hit each other...

...The converted Bronx theater where the cockfight was held contained a fighting pit and bleachers designed to be pulled together in case of a raid...

...The murder takes place in a car, and in order to escape detection, Vincent and Jules take refuge in the house of Vincent's friend Jimmie (played by Tarantino himself...

...Losers in a match don't just retire to their corners...

...In contrast to the comedy of an Evelyn Waugh or Joseph Heller novel, that of Tarantino isn't designed to bring us up short just as we are enjoying ourselves...

...The crazed disorder that follows the murder is the kind the "I Love Lucy" show specialized in during the 1950s...

...t was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers...

...The raid, which received front-page coverage in the New York Times, provided a startling portrait of a secret world in which promoters earn as much as $30,000 a night from admission fees, betting, and liquor sales...

...But in the 1990s it is black rappers who have dominated the music charts with records in which hate and violence are equated with getting respect...

...But what follows is a sequence of events in which the murder (we don't see the body) is never a serious matter...

...At the heart of the decade's "gangsta rap" has been a macho that glorifies the gun and the gang...

...No one has more thoroughly captured this change —and the brutal aesthetic it makes possible— than film director Quentin Tarantino in his Academy Award-winning Pulp Fiction...

...It is a strategy that has made Tarantino the most talked-about film director in Hollywood, and yet he has done nothing that the public is not prepared to do on its own...