Regarding Dargis on Park Chan-wook, I've long stewed over what makes a piece tragic vs. exploitative, or or a bit of violence gratuitous vs. integral. I just don't feel like I'm making any personal progress on the issue. I'm happy Dargis can find the line between exploitation and tragedy, but I still can't do it. Park's no Shakespeare, but are the grim goings-on in Sympathy for Mr. Vengenance really so much worse what befalls poor Gloucester in King Lear?

GLOUCESTER
Because I would not see thy cruel nails
Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister
In his anointed flesh stick [rash] boarish fangs.
The sea, with such a storm as his bare [lowed] head
In hell-black night endured, would have buoy'd up,
And quench'd the stelled fires:
Yet, poor old heart, he holp the heavens to rain [rage].
If wolves had at thy gate howl'd [heard] that stern [dearne] time,
Thou shouldst have said 'Good porter, turn the key.'
All cruels else subscribed: but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children.

CORNWALL
See't shalt thou never. Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine I'll set my foot.

GLOUCESTER
He that will think to live till he be old,
Give me some help! O cruel! O you gods!

[ Cornwall plucks out Gloucester's eye ]

REGAN
One side will mock another; the other too.

She seems to focus on the pleasure problem. Is the difference in Park taking pleasure in the violence? If so, how can she know that about him? Or is the problem the audience taking pleasure in the violence? If so, how can she know that about us? Or is the difference something else entirely?

I call bullshit on Dargis' assertion that the mainstream's co-opting of exploitation is a recent phenomenon. The Hollywood majors have been doing this sort of thing since the early 80s at least when Paramount took the nascent slasher genre on board with Friday the 13th. As for Oldboy being "an arty exploitation flick", the Europeans were doing that decades ago. What the hell else is a film like Salo?

I'm partly with her in that, by and large, I don't think the new extreme cinema has much to offer beyond shock value, but her assertion that it's designed "just to distract and reaffirm the audience's existing worldview" is ridiculous. How does that qualitatively differ from what movies generally—particularly mainstream ones—have been doing almost since their invention?

Jim, I'm afraid I haven't gotten much farther than you on this set of questions, either, and you've put them very well. But heavens, from Sophocles on down, the great dramatists have certainly had it with the eyes, haven't they.

James, I think Manohla Dargis slipped a little off point with that phrase, "the mainstreaming of exploitation." But then again, not much. For the most part, she's addressing the recent greater acceptance and critical praise of this strain of "extreme cinema" on the festival circuit, which, of course, is hardly the mainstream. In turn, though, when the highbrows give their stamp of approval on certain developments, whether they're full-fledged movements or fly-by-night fads, they are attempting in that cute way of theirs to shape mainstream tastes.

That's the way I'd interpret that phrase - and not in the sense of Hollywood's take-up of exploitation straight away, which, as you say, is par for the course.

But this is where things get a little fuzzy, and maybe with twice as many column inches, MD might have been able to be clearer, even though she is writing about how three supposedly distinct fields - art, exploitation and the mainstream (or popular entertainment) - aren't actually all that distinct. But are Kim Ki-duk, Gaspar Noé and Takashi Miike really up to anywhere near the same thing in The Isle, Irreversible and any number of Miike's features? Are they choosing the same elements from each field to overlap in the same way, crossing the same borders?

I think that because they most definitely are not (just as one example, Kim Ki-duk purposefully disrupts his art film with extreme violence while Miike subverts the exploitation formulas he begins with via arty [and sometimes pretty loopy] diversions), MD's argument gets obscured here.

Then, on another level, I think that there may be an underlying suspicion of violence on screen in general as a reactionary impulse (see, for example, countless readings of Tarantino, and for that matter, early Eastwood). Again, it's unfortunate that MD addresses the work of these very different filmmakers all in one fell swoop so that it seems that the only thing they're all up to is playing straight to our revenge fantasies. But there are all sorts of violence. I believe someone once said something about the impossibility of revolution without breaking a few eggs.

the great dramatists have certainly had it with the eyes

Yes... Sophocles, Shakespeare, Fulci... :)