Here is a head count: Innocent East Asian female grocery clerk, shot in cold blood after argument over coffee. Black cop, shot dead. Black Rastifarian heroin dealer, plans to kill hero, but is overcome, bound with duct tape ("You guys always call it "duck tape") and hung upside down in garage.
Dominatrix in red leather mini dress enters, tapes hero to chair, rapes him. Her head is blown off in mid-climax by another visitor, who wants drugs and money, and re-tapes hero to chair, preparing to slice him with power saw. Hero will not bleed to death because visitor has brought along propane torch to cauterize wounds ("I once cut on a girl for 16 hours before she died").
Hero frees self, knocks chainsaw man unconscious, hangs him in garage. Cop arrives, is in on the deal, offers to fix everything if money is handed over. Is shown people hanging upside down in garage, shoots them without asking who they are, leaves. In the middle of this carnage, the dominatrix narrates a flashback about dope-smoking black smack dealers who are gunned down by hero and friend, after which black girl enters room and is killed. (A later flashback doubles back to explain that the girl was eight months pregnant.) The dialog is heavy with the n-word and its usual satellites. The n-word is no longer neutralized by being used primarily by blacks, but is used by whites between themselves. I don't object to these events in the abstract (any subject matter can be appropriate for a film), but to their tone. The film expects audiences to process the sad images through filters of irony--it trusts they'll evade a moral response by using a shield of laughter.
The tortured and peculiar festival program notes for "Thursday," written by Noah Cowan, who introduced the film, speak of "a streak of 'white rage'--not racist reaction, but the desperation of those (largely white) newly enriched Americans to preserve their economic place at any cost--and a rigid ethical structure that would please any Talmudic scholar."
I will save the scholar to analyze Cowan's comments themselves. But after seeing "Thursday," I wonder: What are these characters raging about or against? No one's done anything to them. They're the murderers and torturers. Their "economic place" has been attained by selling drugs and stealing. And we will need to call that scholar back in to explain why it is not racist (in this film, and "Very Bad Things," which Cowan also mentions) to blow away virtually every black, Asian or Indian character without, for the most part, establishing them as anything more than nonwhite targets.
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