Poetry soaked in blood: The cult of film violence has a powerful romantic appeal in our fragmentary, fragile society

Currently showing with the film Pulp Fiction in London is a curious advertisement for Nike, the sports equipment maker. The ad features Eric 'oooh-ah' Cantona who, speaking in his lugubrious French accent, confesses to his footballing sins. He is a bad boy, prone to dissent and violence. His problem, he explains, is who, under the circumstances, will be his sponsor.

The Nike logo appears without comment on a black screen.

The message is clear: Nike is the funky kind of company that is prepared to embrace the heroic, romantic outsider. The company, like Cantona's fans, does not see his sins as sins at all. What Nike sees is his style, which transcends the petty judgments of little people. Indeed, the very essence of this style is that it is accompanied by the very things of which the little people most violently disapprove. To his fans, his crimes are accessories, the essential kit of the existentially pure, authentic soul that is oooh-ah Eric.

This is, of course, trivial. If the youth market suddenly got religion, Nike would dump Eric and embrace the Pope and Eric would, on the advice of his agent, turn into Cliff Richard. But what is not trivial is that this is the smart, young mood of the hour: being authentic, being in the muddy, bloody mess of things, is where it's at. Should you shudder and turn away from the sins, should you even notice them, then you are very definitely not in the hard, romantic flow of contemporary reality.

Which brings me to the main feature - Pulp Fiction. This film, by Quentin Tarantino, has been almost universally received by critics as a masterpiece.

There have been dissenting voices, though these have tended to focus not on its purely cinematic qualities but rather on its violence. Mary Kenny, for example, has eloquently damned the movie as horrific evidence of the depravity of the film industry and its arty pretentious acolytes. She had noticed and turned away from the sins which, to the movie critics, were no more than the usual accessories of Tarantino's style, as predictable and as necessary as Cantona's bad behaviour.

And, meanwhile, James Ferman, our film censor, is wondering whether to give a certificate to Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. This was scripted by Tarantino, although he has subsequently disowned the result. The film includes almost 100 fictional murders and has, so far, been blamed for 10 real murders around the world - one, in Texas, involving the decapitation of a 13-year-old girl by a 14-year-old boy who told friends he wanted to be 'famous like the natural born killers'.

Hilariously, the British censors have been in such a quandary about this film that they invited Stone over to London to justify his work. Perhaps they should also stipulate that he turn up at every performance to explain his higher motives in case audiences leave the cinema labouring under the philistine misconception that his film was just a bit of bloody fun.

I care nothing for Stone, he is a crude, sensationalist and minimally talented director. Tarantino is another matter. He is a natural film- maker.

But this hack and this artist are linked by violence. Their films are soaked with blood, with the impact of bullets on flesh, with the gibbering fear of imminent death, with agonised writhings and, in the case of Pulp Fiction, with the spectacle of the amateur administration of an injection of adrenalin into the heart of a blood and saliva-soaked woman who is dying from an overdose of heroin.

This carnage is a fact of contemporary film. But imagine transporting filmgoers forward from, say, 1950 to a showing of either of these films. The vividness and the explicitness of the violence would overwhelm them, it would be almost the only thing they would notice. They would conclude that the films and audiences of the Nineties were obsessed, that violence was the thing they most admired and wished to celebrate.

They would be right. I once saw a screening of David Lynch's very violent Wild at Heart in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival. The Cannes audience, a specialised collection of film insiders and hangers on, had no inhibitions about expressing their enthusiasms. At every unspeakably bloody act, they leapt to their feet, cheering and applauding wildly.

For the British film censors, a director might earnestly claim that he has made a critique of society or, in Stone's case, 'a satire on the American media'. But the Cannes crowd know better, they want blood and, being in the industry, they know the box office does, too.

The question is: why? The most obvious reason is that films are overwhelmingly American, and Americans are fascinated by violence. In the film industry it is a taste exaggerated by the American sudden-death way of market-testing films. Big movies open on thousands of screens across the country and if they survive the first weekend, they are regarded as a success. These initial audiences consist largely of 18- to 25-year-old males, the sector of society most drawn to violence. The easiest way to make an opening splash is to stimulate and exploit these men with graphic, frequent and sexy violence.

But, it turns out, this American predilection exports incredibly well.

Particularly in its most fantastic, stylised forms - Rambo, Terminator and so on - violence and its accessories of muscles and guns has become a commonplace of global culture. Bloodshed exhilarates in Paris or Harare as surely as it does in New York.

Expressing qualms about this has a tendency to put one immediately in the category of those who do not wear Nike shoes. You are consigned to the stylistic dustbin. Or, if the debate affects a liberal seriousness, you are attacked for advocating censorship and the suppression of artistic freedom.

There is no provable connection, it will be said, between screen violence and real violence. Indeed, screen violence may have a cathartic effect, draining people of their impulses really to stab or shoot people.

Almost all of these arguments are nonsense. You have to be either a fool or intellectually corrupt not to feel and acknowledge the connection between the screen and the world. One does not become a different person when one leaves the cinema. My time-travellers from 1950 would walk out of their screening, scanning the streets anxiously, convinced they had been translated to a mad, bloodthirsty dystopia. They would wonder about the states of mind of people accustomed to seeing such things for fun.

Nevertheless, there is one liberal, anti-censorship argument that intrigues me. Consider Japan, say the liberals; there is a nation routinely exposed to enormous amounts of fictional violence and yet which still has relatively low crime rates as well as a high degree of social cohesion and order. There can, therefore, be no necessary connection between the screen and the street.

This is intriguing because I think it points to the heart of the matter of screen violence. Japan is a society supremely gifted at acquiring the superficialities of style and grafting them on to its own sophisticated, layered culture.

What the Japanese do not do is assume that a style entails a way of life. If they choose to be punks or hippies, they are, as it were, punks or hippies for the night. Their underlying purposes are unaffected. The West, in contrast, associates such styles directly with ideologies, with ethical postures and with genuinely anti-social attitudes.

And so it is with the cult of violence. In societies where social cohesion is fragile and its purposes disputed, images of purpose and coherence become dangerously potent. Violence is just such an image. Nothing in Pulp Fiction is so vivid as the gibbering hysteria of the victims before the barrel of the gun that they know for certain is about to kill them. Here is a totality, a romantic truth about the edge of experience. And from this romantic edge Tarantino, brilliantly but chillingly, derives a terrible poetry, turning his hit-men into witty, literate, introspective masters of their situation and framing them with an exquisite narrative formality and a cool, knowing awareness of the conventions of film.

It all works because it is structured by the cult and the constant threat of violence, without which the film would be formless. In other words, the Japanese argument is inappropriate. They have the constant recourse to their still stable sense of themselves; we do not.

Inevitably, therefore, the West seeks out myths and forms outside society that offer the completion and authenticity ordinary life does not. The marketing myth of bad boy Eric is as much a part of this process as the crass cinematic myths of Oliver Stone or the poetic logic of Tarantino.

In this interpretation, censorship may be seen as no more than the cosmetic suppression of a symptom, a fancy neck-tie, as Samuel Beckett might have put it, worn to conceal a throat cancer. But to say that the real disease is society and therefore all censorship is pointless, is dangerous. Any extremity can be indulged as the expression of the Western desire for an absolute, a totality of experience. Lines must be drawn or even the possibility of coherence will be lost.

And even Oliver Stone must draw lines. How, in the last analysis, does he really feel about those 10 deaths attributed to his film? Happy? Sure of himself? I do not care, but about Tarantino, I worry.

(Photograph omitted)