The violent new wave.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

IT HARDLY is news that the contemporary cinema is hyperviolent, but there appears to be a new tendency in film that ups the ante on ways of demonstrating the worthlessness of human life. Given that these films come at a time of new, humanistic movies ("Lorenzo's Oil," "Malcolm X"), one might sense that, particularly with their excessiveness, the new wave of violence is a culmination to a nihilistic trend that was very evident throughout the 1980s and suggested a despairing, suicidal culture.

The most notable cause celebre of current on-screen violence is without doubt "Reservoir Dogs," by first-time filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. It deals with a gang of addlebrained thugs who badly botch a jewel heist (which never is seen) and spend most of the picture hiding out in a warehouse while engaging in some bloody internecine feuding as they try to figure out who among them is the stool pigeon. Some bravura performances from Lawrence Tierney, Chris Penn, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, and especially Harvey Keitel don't dull the edge of some moments so grisly (an ear slowly sliced off and a hood writhing in a pool of blood that inexorably widens) as to satiate the most gluttonous appetite for destruction.

What gives the movie its nihilism is as much its steady stream of pop culture allusions (suggesting a rather typical immersion in media culture, rather than a concern for authentic moral, social, and philosophical ideas) as its bloodletting. The audience is given a barrage of references to Madonna, Lee Marvin movies, and the old TV cop show "Baretta." The soundtrack is filled with the most banal 1970s pop-rock, good-humored rip-offs of Bob Dylan and the Beatles used, it seems, to underscore the filmmaker's disbelief in the efficacy of pop culture in representing the best aspirations of American life. This allusionistic cinema has less to do with underscoring the notion of the pervasive effects of media than with bolstering a particularly insulated, cynical moral vision.

At the same time, "Reservoir Dogs," coming as it does at the dawn of the multicultural, relatively progressive Clinton era, reads like a swan song for male-oriented action movies, a grotesque, postmodern--"Rio Bravo," a world of men without women where the romanticism of that conceit is stripped away. Ideas dear to such directors as Howard Hawks savagely are sent up here. The loyalty of the male group and "professionalism"--ideas central to the western, the crime film, and the war...