Campbell Brown appeared on today's Morning Joe to promote her campaign against violence in entertainment media. But while she made some solid suggestions, it was Joe Scarborough who took matters a quantum leap further, calling Quentin Tarantino "a pornographer of violence."
In line with her op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Brown criticized President Obama, post Newtown, for focusing almost exclusively on gun control while largely ignoring the issue of violence in media. She encouraged him to pull a Sister Souljah/Nixon-to-China and use his extraordinary ties with Hollywood to bring pressure on media makers to deal with the extreme violence they purvey. But it was Scarborough who used the strongest language, repeatedly calling Tarantino a pornographer, accusing him of coarsening America's culture, and asking when America is going to start calling out people like him. View the video after the jump.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: What would be a lot more effective if if arbiters of what is culturally acceptable would start treating people like Quentin Tarantino like the pornographer that he is. Here's a guy right after Newton that was as unbelievably insensitive as anybody in the NRA. The things he said afterwards: just as insensitive. And yet, this man was the toast of Hollywood. Despite the graphic violence in all of his movies including the last on, that again was just praised to high heavens. He is a pornographer of violence. He has made hundreds of millions of dollars for people in Hollywood by being a pornographer of violence, by coarsening America's culture, by bloodying America's culture. and yet he is still praised. When are we culturally going to start calling out people like this?
My two cents: I pretty much stopped going to the movies about 10 years ago, but in recent times have starting watching some, and did see Django Unchained. In the movie's early going, I found some of the characters intriguing. But by the end, it had degenerated into such a total bloodbath that I found myself wondering what Tarantino's point was other than to treat his audience to an orgy of violence.
