New Wave Cinema 2.0: The Films of Quentin Tarantino

pinguino k (original), Gryllida (crop), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

In The New Wave 2.0 series, The Pen in Hand Blog will be examining the work of today’s most provocative and influential filmmakers, artists whose filmic stylings and compelling narratives have stretched the boundaries of modern cinema. Drawing upon Francois Truffaut’s definition of an auteur, these pieces will be looking at writer/directors whose singular visions have transcended the art of filmmaking and expanded the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. This week, The Pen in Blog will be looking at the provocative, intense, and immensely entertaining movies of Quentin Tarantino.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Else:

The Films of Quentin Tarantino

From Reservoir Dogs, his breakthrough flick about a diamond robbery gone bad, to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a reimagining of the Hollywood in 1969, Quentin Tarantino has mesmerized audiences with his directorial trademarks: the exceptionally sharp dialogue—featuring particularly incisive exchanges with the occasionally banal and funny detours (“Would you give me a foot rub, Jules?”), incredibly outlandish narratives (that can—and usually do—turn on a dime, leaving the viewer hanging on for dear life), and excessively brutal violence. It’s a challenging mix, but Tarantino makes it work.

With a few exceptions, his films are variations of the classic revenge plot theme, and in most cases, it is the weaker victim exacting vengeance on the attacker. In Deathproof, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is beaten by a group of young women he tried to kill. The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill, Vol. I seeks out the assassins who tried to murder her at her wedding—and succeeds. The Hateful Eight a series of harrowing—and constantly narrowing—concentric circles of hate, vengeance, and violence. The stories are a ton of fun, but even in these violent and harrowing narratives, there is an underlying sense of unreality transcending the expected arc of the fictive narrative, as if the audience is suspending disbelief twice—or even multiple times.

Pulp Fiction, with its cross-referenced episodic structure, convoluted timeline, and ubiquitous references to pop culture, is a fascinating nosedive into the Los Angeles underworld—except that it never feels as if we’re in that reality. Tarantino uses his anti-hero gangsters Jules and Vince principally as narrative touchstones in the film. They function principally as archetypes instead of people. Even though we see Jules and Vince slaughter a room of would-be thieves, it is not an act that comes off as horrible or evil. It is little more than a plot point, somehow seeming hollow and a little glib, as if the two assassins are simply going through the motions, like paging through a comic book (or at a movie)—something we pick up for entertainment or distraction. 

During the opening sequence of Pulp Fiction, when Jules and Vince are traveling to a job, their conversation ranges to everything from the French quarter-pounder—Le Royale—to the sexual ambiguity of foot rubs. Their focus on whether giving another man’s wife a foot massage goes over the line focuses on these characters’ moral sense, resulting in a minimization of the violence they are about to inflict. We don’t mind the killings as much as we should because they seem like kind of nice guys. In Reservoir Dogs, the diamond thieves argue over the reasons for tipping a waitress. Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) argues that he shouldn’t have to pay somebody extra for doing their jobs while all other hoods rant at him for being a cheapskate.

Another recurring motif in his work are the ubiquitous references to popular movie culture, although his use of popular music is as dead-on appropriate as his dialogue—think of “Stuck in the Middle with You” during the dismemberment scene in Reservoir Dogs. His referencing of films ranges from spaghetti Westerns to classics of the French New Wave to Kung-Fu movies to the grindhouse flicks at the local drive-in theater and seems to be at the heart of Tarantino’s artistic sensibility. 

He is the king of pastiche, the postmodern technique of borrowing (or stealing, as Tarantino himself terms it) scenes from earlier movies and stitching them together to create a new cinematic experience. Inglorious Basterds uses elements from The Dirty Dozen as well as aristocratic sets that seem borrowed from the castle in Where Eagles Dare, yet its climactic scene veers into an ultra-violent fantasy revenge sequence where the Nazis finally get their due.

Pulp Fiction borrows its famous dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim’s (with servers dressed as everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Buddy Holly) from scenes in The Band of Outsiders and 8 1/2.  Black exploitation films, B movies, and the Westerns are all fodder for Tarantino’s bold derivations. Like much postmodern art, which recycles past works into something new—think sampling in hip-hop—Tarantino’s work can function as either a cynical aside or as a genuine tribute to past artists. Tarantino, who is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, is always highly respectful of those who came before him. He borrows script ideas, cinematic techniques, and genre cliches (see the cast in The Hateful Eight) to make his movies familiar, while rendering them—on one level—unknowable. In most of his plots, even though they twist and turn more than a roller coaster, the endings seem as inevitable as the Hollywood happy ending, but the unexpected conversational asides are mesmerizing distractions. 

In Deathproof, when the girls Abernathy, Lee, and Zoe have a lengthy and fascinating discussion about handling sexuality with their boyfriends, it’s as if time—and the plot—are temporarily suspended for a detour into a glimpse into the life of these young women. While this aside is entertaining and fascinating, it really reveals nothing significant about these characters. It’s like listening to an interesting conversation at a party, rather than seeing they type of character development found in a more traditional movie. It simply shows that these girls are cool.

The fact that one of the characters. Lee Montgomery (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wears a cheerleading outfit throughout the film—explained because she’s playing an actress playing a cheerleader—carries an emblematic quality of the idea of her character more than the person herself. It’s also a reference to some of the grindhouse films the director is so fond of. The outfit tells us what type of character she is immediately and for the purposes of the film, Tarantino doesn’t have tell us anymore about her.

While Tarantino’s work may seem deliberately and relentlessly transparent on the surface—because we can see him at work choosing his “samplings” from previous work—it still contains an enigmatic quality. When Pulp Fiction first came out, a fellow student in my postmodern literature class asked the professor what she thought the film was about. She shrugged and said, “Nothing. It’s not about anything except itself.” While I think this may be somewhat accurate—though harsh—on a thematic level, Tarantino’s films are not only wonderfully quirky and entertaining films, but they are a reflection of our own cultural status. His films are made up of the same bits and pieces of film that constitute our own cultural sensibilities, simultaneously embodying and determining popular culture.  

No one makes films like Quentin Tarantino. He is a master archivist, cutting and pasting images, ideas, and memories into a brand-new cinematic experience.

Sources

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/quentin-tarantino-movies-steals-cinema-homage-reference-2019-7