go out on strike. But their strike is full of violent incidents: they get into fist fights, they blow up trucks, they beat up cops. Whenever they have a problem, they use violence to deal with it.Psychological violence, that is, intimidation or the threat of violence, is also an important element of this film. Vinnie is a gang leader who uses psychological violence to control and manipulate his gang and other people in the neighborhood. He is able to manipulate people psychologically and verbally, to make people afraid of him. They believe that if they don’t listen him, he will turn physically violent. They have lots of reasons to believe this because Vinnie is infamous in his neighbourhood. Everyone knows that he is a violent person. To sum up, violence is a central element of the film, Last Exit to Brooklyn. The violence in this movie is never trivialized or gratuitous. Although there is a lot of violence, the whole point of the film is to show how violent American society really is. The violence is not “splatter” violence; it is not meant to excite or entertain the audience. It is there because it a “normal” part of the everyday behaviour of people who live in that society. In order to survive in a “tough” world, or to show that they are “somebodies” or “men,” characters inflict violence—verbal, psychological, and physical—on others, especially on those who are weaker than they are, like women and gays, or those who are non-violent. There are very few decent, non-violent characters in this film—a naive, young soldier who treats the prostitute as if she were a “person,” a young boy, who is in love with the prostitute and who is probably the only person who ever “cried” for her and tries to rescue her at the end. But the goodness of these characters is just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of violence in the society....
