In the introduction of his book “The New Brutality Film” Paul Gormley attempts to clarify the relations of affect between the screen and the viewer in the 1990s Hollywood cinema. The author claims that his book tries to renew the affective influence of the US cinema by miming the power of African-American and particularly hip-hop culture. To prove that thesis Gormley analyses films like Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs, Se7en, and Strange Days. The author was successful in convincing me to his claim. The introduction of the book begins with recalling the description of the infamous torture scene from Reservoir Dogs, which is extremely important to support the author’s thesis. The scene contains number of characteristics important to understand the very new chapter in the 1990s cinema in the USA, that is called ‘new-brutality’ film in Gormley’s book. Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs, Se7en, and Strange Days – all these films have one thing in common. That is their attempt to revive the affective qualities of the Hollywood commercial films. All of these films contain scenes and images that aim to shock and influence the viewer. The violent and brutal scenes make the viewer act in the way that he imitates and mimics the actions he sees on the screen. But at the same time in Reservoir Dogs during the torture scene Mr. Blonde turns the radio on and listens to “Stuck in the Middle with You”, which may seem amusing to the audience. That is not without a purpose. By means of using brutal, violent scenes to move and influence a viewer and combining it with the popular culture and song he uses, Tarantino manipulates the audience and the emotions it experiences. He affects the viewer the way he wants to. As the book analyses very important period of Hollywood cinema, Gormley supports his claims by using the works of thinkers like Deleuze, Jameson, Zizek and Benjamin. When talking about the ‘Affect and Cultural Knowledge’ he focuses on the problem of the relation between the cinema and language, on which Gilles Deleuze concentrated his attention in his book Cinema 2.
It seems that, according to Massumi, when we see an image, at first there is our body response to it, and just than this response becomes meaning. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is a proper example to prove Massumi’s theory. As I mentioned before, there is this connection between what happens on the screen and how the body of the viewer reacts to that. The viewer is subject to the tortures just like the cop is tied to a chair. He first sees the tortures and winces and pulls the face as if it is his body being tortured. When it comes to the ‘Postmodern Blockbuster’, Gormley claims that the relationship between the meaning, knowledge and the attempt to carry the affective meaning is achieved differently in different films. There is the tendency, in the postmodern cinema, to include the reference to other film. To support this claim the author uses the example of the relationship between the viewer and the film Star Wars and its references to western genre. Gormley says that in most postmodern films, there is a lack of the connection between the viewer and the screen as it used to be in the classical Hollywood films of the 30s, 40s and 50s. He convinces us that the spectator of most postmodern productions doesn’t lose himself in the film as it happened during the Golden Era of Hollywood. In my opinion the new-brutality films attempts to change that by influencing and affecting the viewer by different means, as in Reservoir Dogs by brutal and violent images. To sum up, Gormley in his introduction of the book “The New Brutality Film” explains the relation between affect and cultural knowledge in order to make the viewer understand better the meaning of the new-brutality films like Reservoir Dogs. The most important thing is to understand the aesthetic differences between the new-brutality film and other modern action films, as Gormley calls them ‘postmodern blockbusters’.