COMMENTARY : Can 200 Critics Be Wrong? (Maybe) : Movies: ‘Pulp Fiction’ is a dark comedy where viewers gasp, then laugh, then look forward to the next sick joke. Isn’t it?

In its long and checkered history, Hollywood has been compared to some pretty odious institutions, but it took Quentin Tarantino’s violent gangster comedy “Pulp Fiction,” and its accompanying tidal wave of rave reviews, to inspire a comparison with the tobacco industry.

“Like contemporary tobacco chiefs who deny any link between cigarettes and cancer, Hollywood executives will be sitting before congressional committees 10 years from now in adamant denial,” wrote USA Today columnist Joe Urschel, in a severe rebuke of “Pulp Fiction.”

“They will continue to callously brush off the connections between their products and the violence in society--despite an avalanche of scientific studies showing the connection.”

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But it is not Hollywood, or even “Pulp Fiction,” that has worked Urschel into such a lather. It’s the critics who bought into the film’s “brazen depravity,” and in their four-star enthusiasm sent thousands of innocent lambs to their psychic slaughter.

“Unlike the tobacco industry,” Urschel wrote, “Hollywood has a powerful coterie of sycophants and enablers in the press who wrap this craven merchandising in the cloak of artistic expression and try to elevate it to the level of something holy and good.”

In a follow-up telephone conversation, Urschel pressed his attack on film critics even further, saying we take no moral responsibility for the antisocial movies we often praise, reviewing them instead as “distinct and isolated pieces of art that have no effect or afterlife outside the theater.”

(Last week, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. gave six Golden Globe Award nominations to “Pulp Fiction,” including best film drama. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Film Critics voted “Pulp Fiction” best picture of the year, the National Board of Review voted a tie between “Pulp” and “Forrest Gump,” and the New York Film Critics Circle honored “Quiz Show.”)

As one who stands accused--I have been praising “Pulp Fiction” since its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May--I’d like to be able to dismiss Urschel’s indictment for the Religious Right ideological hysteria it resembles. But I can’t.

First, I’ve known Urschel for 16 years (before he became a pundit, he edited my reviews at both the Detroit Free Press and USA Today) and he’s a perfectly bright and reasonable fellow. Second, he is far from alone in his outrage. I’ve received more letters from readers about “Pulp Fiction” than any other film this year, most of them condemning Newsday’s sanguine critical coverage of it, and Hollywood insiders say its warped mix of humor and violence has taken it out of the running for the Oscar. Finally, though I believe Urschel badly misreads the appeal and potential harmfulness of “Pulp Fiction,” he does raise some valid questions about the nature of reviewing movies in mass audience publications.

Do critics who see 150 or more movies a year go overboard in reviewing the stylistically fresh ones that come along, regardless of their content, morality or accessibility to general viewers?

And are we too inured to the extremes of sex and violence to be able to provide fair warnings to the occasional moviegoer?

“You don’t take somebody who hasn’t been to a movie in two years and plop them in front of this one,” Urschel says.

Based on the nearly 100 “Pulp Fiction” reviews from around the country that I just read, the answer to the first question is “yes.” Most of us probably do get a little giddy over the arrival of a new talent like Tarantino, and exaggerate his importance. But did critics fail, as a group, to adequately characterize the violence, profanity and drug use in the film? No.

“It won’t just offend some audiences,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington in a tone echoed by many of his colleagues. “It will offend the living hell out of them.”

If you haven’t seen the movie or been caught in the cross-fire of water-cooler debate over it, “Pulp Fiction” is a series of cleverly interwoven stories set in a film-noirish Los Angeles underworld. It stars a pair of amiably chatty mob assassins (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), a double-crossing boxer (Bruce Willis), a pair of Bonnie-and-Clyde wanna-bes (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer), and an array of mob bosses, molls, girlfriends, drug dealers and redneck crazies who fill out its twisted human landscape.

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Along the way, people are riddled with bullets, a victim’s brains are splattered like pureed mango all over the inside of a car, a drug-overdosed woman has a six-inch hypodermic needle rammed into her heart, a man is tied up and sodomized. All in good fun, Tarantino-style.

Many critics made a game effort to put a moral spin on its outlandishness--themes of redemption and loyalty do wend their way through the material. But it would be preposterous to suggest “Pulp Fiction” contains any serious social commentary, and few critics claimed it did.

“ ‘Pulp Fiction’ is rubbish about scum,” wrote M.V. Moorhead, of the Phoenix, Ariz., New Times, quickly adding, “It’s also very funny and entertaining.”

Tarantino himself has never described “Pulp Fiction” as anything other than a ‘90s movie version of a ‘30s pulp novel, Raymond Chandler on smack, and after two films (“Pulp” and “Reservoir Dogs”) and four produced screenplays (“True Romance” was directed by Tony Scott, and Oliver Stone rewrote and directed “Natural Born Killers”), all we really know about him is that he has a brilliant ear for dialogue, a gift for story structure, an irrepressible passion for actors, movies and big scenes, and the daring of a daylight pickpocket.

Whether the 31-year-old high-school dropout and video-store guru has the native intellect and social vision to go the distance as an auteur-- whether he has anything, after all, to say --remains to be seen.

In the meantime, his audacious use of the medium, his ability to simultaneously shock and amuse, has, indeed, been catnip to the bored legions of American movie critics.

Being surprised, seeing things done in different ways, discovering new talent--these are the all-too-rare events that restore and invigorate the faith of full-time moviegoers. They are also the things that often drive a wedge between reviewers, at least of general-circulation publications, and those readers merely looking for advice for an evening’s entertainment.

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Mainstream moviegoers are generally skeptical of a film that critics agree on; experience tells them it is bound to be artsy-fartsy and boring.

But “Pulp Fiction” is, from all indications (reviews, advertising, word-of-mouth), a mainstream Hollywood movie with major stars, beautiful sets, lots of action and big laughs. If it is also contains extremes of profanity and violence, so what? Sounds like “Lethal Weapon” to me.

All those elements are present, but perverted. Tarantino uses John Travolta against expectations; he’s Vinny Barbarino gone to middle-age seed, a bloated, dewy-eyed assassin who kills people between fixes of heroin and fast foods. The action sequences play like balloons with their knots untied, spinning off in crazily unpredictable directions. You’ve heard all the swear words before, but never sewn together in such colorful patterns.

And the individual acts of violence, while never as grueling or inhumane as the torture scene in “Reservoir Dogs,” have elements of surprise that demand a response, either laughter or stupefying moral outrage.

For viewers who went in expecting a conventional movie, it must have been like walking into a club where everyone knew the password and secret handshake but them.

In a column that appeared as a counterpoint to critic Jack Garner’s four-star review in the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat & Chronicle, Lee Krenis More warned readers to be wary of critics’ praise of “Pulp Fiction” because “the movie they’re bubbling over may not be the same one you end up fidgeting through . . . 2 1/2 hours of gangster Angst in which the only moral law is the law of the jungle and style is the only value that counts.”

True. The movie is a tour de force of personal style. Tarantino is to hard-boiled crime fiction what Charlie Parker was to jazz--a raw talent putting new riffs on old tunes, and it definitely narrows the audiences. Tarantino has scavenged his memory bank for favorite bits from other films, seasoned them with pop-culture references and molded it all into something simultaneously familiar and original.

Recognizing those hip references is part of the fun, if you care , and part of the confusion if you don’t.

If there was a common flaw in the reviews of “Pulp Fiction,” it was that critics fashioned their analyses for the most knowledgeable fans. How many people would know what’s so funny about having a “Douglas Sirk steak” appear on the menu at a ‘50s Hollywood-motif restaurant? A half-dozen critics chuckled at the reference in their reviews; none explained it. (Sirk was a director whose films were often laced with subtle ironies about American culture.)

Still, people shocked at the content of “Pulp Fiction” have to take some of the responsibility. There were warning signs in virtually every review, but you do have to get all the way through them. Readers often glance at critics’ ratings, scan a capsule, check the ad, and hop into the family car.

“Some guy called a few years ago madder than hell at me because he’d taken his wife and kids to see ‘Blue Velvet,’ ” says the Democrat & Chronicle’s Garner. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, you gave it four stars!’ ”

The acquired taste required to enjoy “Pulp Fiction” is dark comedy. It’s the realm of Shuttle disaster and O.J. Simpson jokes, where you half-choke on laughs that begin with a gasp. No, no, no, you can’t laugh at that . But you do, and then look forward to the next one. After every magnitude-10 national disaster, psychologists gently assure us that the inevitable sick jokes are OK, even healthy. They relieve tension, promote healing--enjoy!

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Movies have made light of just about every serious subject known--war (“MASH”), nuclear annihilation (“Dr. Strangelove”), death (“The Loved One”), divorce (“The War of the Roses”), suicidal compulsion (“Harold and Maude”), even Christ (“The Life of Brian”)--and audiences who enjoyed them incurred the temporary wrath of those who were offended.

“Pulp Fiction” has sounded a greater alarm for some people because urban violence seems such an unstoppable force, a growing sore on America’s soul, and if you are able to laugh at the problem, you must be part of the problem.

“Cultural anthropologists are going to look back on American society and look at the audiences’ reaction to this movie,” says Nina Easton, a Washington-based journalist who often writes about changing values for the Los Angeles Times magazine. “It’s a sign of how casual violence has become.”

“That’s what’s made ‘Pulp Fiction’ such a flash point for people,” says USA Today’s Urschel. “It has no redeeming value in itself; it’s just a joke on violence, on life . . . It’s the absolute essence of amorality.”

No, it isn’t. It’s just a movie, rubbish about scum, and very, very funny. It may be a milestone in Quentin Tarantino’s career, but not in humanity’s march to oblivion. If all we have to worry about is the great plague of movie criticism and the tastes of audiences who laugh at sick jokes, the future will take care of itself.