The Man and the Movies
Rainer Werner Fassbinder said: “Every decent director only has one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again”. Fassbinder lived a tough life, beginning with a childhood in which he moved frequently, and an adulthood marred by his homosexuality, in a time when the world wasn’t too hot for homosexuality, before drinking and drugging himself into an early grave. His films, correspondingly, bleed out emotion like a throbbing wound. The “one subject” of his films could be said to be the ideal we chain to love and the ways in which we corrupt and destroy this ideal in reality. The life of every artist will seep through into their work, whether the artist be willing or not. In the films of Quentin Tarantino, the “one subject” is The Movies itself. His movies take their plots, their characters, their emotions, from other movies. They exist in a sort of Movieverse, not recognisable by looking out the window but by changing the channel.
In interview with the BBC, Werner Herzog’s advice to young filmmakers was to live life, travel, and read a lot: “Somebody who has been a boxer in Africa would be better trained as a filmmaker than if he had graduated from one of the best film schools in the world”. Tarantino didn’t attend a film school, but neither has his life included any interludes boxing in Africa. Tarantino grew up in Los Angeles with his mother. His jobs of note before finding success were as an usher in a porn theatre and a video store clerk. His original ambition was to be an actor, of which he did some training, before his ambitions changed to writing and directing. There is of course more to the early life of any person than this, but all of what is known of Tarantino’s formative years can be related back to the movies. He spent his days skipping school to watch old westerns and B-movies and his job as video store clerk gave him one of the few venues in which an encyclopedic knowledge of film can be somewhat cool. His first agent (according to journalist Sharon Waxman) claimed that the young Tarantino hardly knew how to bathe himself, but he already had a great knack for writing scripts, and for that she helped him out with everything else.
In Inglorious Basterds, a roll of film (because of film’s flammability) is used to set a theatre on fire that has trapped inside it Hitler and many other key members of the Third Reich. In Tarantino’s Movieverse it’s the movies that won the war and saved the world.
* * *
A cherry-red 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu screeches across the road. The driver is in a flash black suit. In the passenger seat, following an overdose, is a comatose woman. I imagine you know the scene: from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. This scene, and the movie itself, has entered the lexicon of popular culture. But it is a scene constructed out of popular culture. It is a remake (homage, re-enactment, whatever you want to call it) of a scene from the 70s movie The Driver. Resampled into Tarantino’s movie the way a hip hop artist might resample multiple older tracks into a new song. Pulp Fiction is filled with homages like this: Bruce Willis being spotted by his gangster boss walking past his (Willis’s) car is a shot-for-shot remake of the same scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); the dance scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman is inspired by a similar dance scene in a cafe in Godard’s Bande a Part (1964); even the setup of the Travolta-Thurman section - a gangster taking his boss’s wife out on a date and things going wrong - reeks of the stories that were commonplace in the pulpy crime novels of America’s past. It is not only references but the soul and the subject matter of Tarantino’s films that are drawn from pop culture.
As Picasso is attributed as saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Tarantino would agree wholeheartedly.
* * *
Tarantino was a busy man in the 90s. He had the sole credit as writer/director of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (notice the obsession with two word titles) and that’s on top of writing True Romance, writing and starring in From Dusk Til Dawn, and being given a “story by” credit for Natural Born Killers for writing the original script, little of which made it into the movie. Tarantino’s “breakthrough” film was Pulp Fiction, which built on everything that had earned him attention with Reservoir Dogs: a colourful pop culture soundtrack; characters who have a tendency for monologue and chats about foot massages and McDonald’s; tense situations that culminate in quick and sudden moments of violence; and a story in which the chronology is messed up, a technique that may seem somewhat commonplace now but is only so because of the influence Tarantino had on filmmakers. Pulp Fiction wasn’t just a passing craze as its detractors claimed: it stands as a classic of crime, grindhouse and post-modern cinema.
Tarantino’s follow up, Jackie Brown, released in 1997 and is unique in the Tarantino cannon. It is the only one of his films that doesn’t take place in the Movieverse but feels set in the real world, or at least a real world of people who’ve watched a good few noir and blaxploitation films. This could be because it is the only Tarantino movie adapted from another source: Jackie Brown is adapted from Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. It is a slow, carefully paced film, stretching scenes out the way Sergio Leone, Tarantino’s favourite director, once did. There is little violence, with most focus on the characters and the ways they find to double cross one another. Many call Jackie Brown Tarantino’s best, debatable of course, but it is certainly his most restrained and unique movie.
After Jackie Brown, Tarantino took a six year hiatus, and there is a clear split between the movies that came before and came after. Some fans of his 90s output have never gotten on well with his post-hiatus movies. In his time away Tarantino bought into his own hype. His films since have played up to his image as much as Jackie Brown played it down. Violence is the clearest example: violence had always been part of the Tarantino discussion, but in the films violence had played more in the setups of scenes and stories than the execution of them. Tarantino had always appeared more interested in the situation that leads to someone getting shot than the shooting itself. When Bruce Willis stabs a man with a samurai sword in Pulp Fiction the camera cuts away. It is unclear if this was done for budgetary reasons or if it was a stylistic choice but either way it takes the focus away from the bloodiness of the things being acted out.
Compare this to Kill Bill released in 2003. It is a film of hyperviolence, where people explode in fountains of blood and floors are left carpeted with limbs. The premise: a woman, who we know only as The Bride, who worked as a killer-for-hire before escaping to a more normal life, is shot on her wedding day, her groom killed along with the whole of his family, and the baby she was pregnant with gone too, setting her off on an odyssey of revenge. Kill Bill is inspired by - right down to individual shots and characters - samurai movies and B-pictures of the past. And it’s a damn lot of fun. The movie is split into two “volumes” both very different from the other. Volume 1 is a bloodbath; the end fight scene is one of the greatest in cinema. Volume 2 is slower, more intimate, and puts great focus on a cast of characters who were only mildly explored in Volume 1. It’s an easy movie to like, while it is also easy to see why many fans were turned off by Tarantino’s change in style, especially considering the trajectory one could imagine him going in after Jackie Brown.
Every movie that has followed - Grindhouse, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight - has used this exaggerated style. Hyperviolent; cartoonish; tongue-in-cheek. Tarantino has played to his image instead of attempting to divert it. Pulp Fiction may have featured flashes of madness, but sequences such as when Travolta takes Thurman out on a date and they enter a dance competition are more than violence or witty dialogue - Tarantino used his mesh of pop culture to create something romantic and funny. He has never managed the same since. He has, in some of his recent movies, though, created some of the best genre films of recent times. Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s most elaborate and most rewarding movie, and The Hateful Eight is his darkest and most intense.
Tarantino’s next movie, planned for release next year, is about two men trying to make it big in the film industry during the time (and apparently involving) the Charles Manson murders. This, at first, might seem a leap from anything Tarantino has done before. But, as explained by Sophie Gilbert in a recent article for The Atlantic, Manson was a man spawned by the American culture of the 60s: he formed his “family” (i.e. cult) amid the hysteria of the counterculture movement, he used techniques he learned from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People to attract his followers, and he found immense fame (and even hardcore fans) due to the media attention he received following his arrest. On second thought, Manson is the perfect subject for a Tarantino movie.
* * *
Following the success of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino gained a level of celebrity not typically experienced by directors. He appeared on game shows and a roster of talk shows, and was the first director to gain a large fan following on internet communities (“The Church of Tarantino” was one such site in the 90s). And, ever since, his fingerprints have been all over the film industry: I once saw an interview with a professional script reader who warned anyone going into his line of work to get ready to read an endless onslaught of scripts about black-suited hitman who stylishly blow their targets away while discussing Madonna songs and fast food.
In interviews Tarantino is highly energetic. His films have, for more than two decades now, personified a particular brand of cool, yet seeing Tarantino interviewed instantly dispels this notion. He talks too fast, and too egotistically about his own work, and, in tibits regarding his personal life, he reveals he goes to the cinema alone to watch rom-coms and devotes a lot of spare time to buying copies of rare B-movies to watch in his home cinema and collecting board games based on 80s TV shows. Many filmmakers boast an encyclopedic knowledge and superhuman interest in film, Martin Scorsese for instance, but Scorsese has used this interest to create films about the real world, about religion, about his ancestry and about the Italian-American mob, Tarantino has used this interest to make movies about movies. And, because of this, it is easy to label Tarantino a film fanatic who never quite grew up; but then again, it is only a man of his temperament that could have created the films he has created.
* * *
Tarantino is the only director who, since the start of his career in 1992, has become a household name - a case could be made for Peter Jackson, and to a lesser extent J. J. Abrams, but both earned their fame directing blockbuster franchises that outweigh their own namesakes, whereas Tarantino is a sellable franchise by name alone. And, like all things that gain a large following, Tarantino has faced a large backlash. Love and hate for the man run equally deep, although it is undoubtedly a sign of something that he rarely conjures up mild opinions.
Here are the core arguments made against Tarantino’s work: 1) Tarantino never deals with “real” emotions or characters, instead hiding his films behind a wall of superficial violence and witty dialogue and a focus on “style over substance”. 2) His movies lack variety. 3) He is too reliant on movies from the past. 4) With his two most recent movies, both set in Southern states of North America, and both featuring slavery as a key plot point, some viewers (most vocally, fellow director Spike Lee) felt that Tarantino ignored dealing with serious issues in favour of using them as a backdrop for his genre films. In this case: westerns. 5) Tarantino’s filmography is front-heavy: his first two movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are better than anything that has proceeded them.
Most of these criticisms circle round the same idea: that he hasn’t grown as an artist. Pulp Fiction was a jolt to the system. It shook up what people were expecting from movies. I watched it years later, at maybe 13 years old, and it gave me the feeling there was a whole world of films I hadn’t seen and needed to because they might be as good as this one. It was only Tarantino’s second film and thus advertised a galaxy of possibilities of where he might go next, possibilities some people clearly think he never made use of. I believe this misses the point. Tarantino doesn’t need to make a love story or a true-life drama; at heart, he is still the video store clerk who wants to make bloody, witty movies featuring shots take from Sergio Leone movies and to be spoken of in the same sentences as Sam Peckinpah. Under that criteria, Tarantino has no equal.
In interview with the BBC, Werner Herzog’s advice to young filmmakers was to live life, travel, and read a lot: “Somebody who has been a boxer in Africa would be better trained as a filmmaker than if he had graduated from one of the best film schools in the world”. Tarantino didn’t attend a film school, but neither has his life included any interludes boxing in Africa. Tarantino grew up in Los Angeles with his mother. His jobs of note before finding success were as an usher in a porn theatre and a video store clerk. His original ambition was to be an actor, of which he did some training, before his ambitions changed to writing and directing. There is of course more to the early life of any person than this, but all of what is known of Tarantino’s formative years can be related back to the movies. He spent his days skipping school to watch old westerns and B-movies and his job as video store clerk gave him one of the few venues in which an encyclopedic knowledge of film can be somewhat cool. His first agent (according to journalist Sharon Waxman) claimed that the young Tarantino hardly knew how to bathe himself, but he already had a great knack for writing scripts, and for that she helped him out with everything else.
In Inglorious Basterds, a roll of film (because of film’s flammability) is used to set a theatre on fire that has trapped inside it Hitler and many other key members of the Third Reich. In Tarantino’s Movieverse it’s the movies that won the war and saved the world.
* * *
A cherry-red 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu screeches across the road. The driver is in a flash black suit. In the passenger seat, following an overdose, is a comatose woman. I imagine you know the scene: from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. This scene, and the movie itself, has entered the lexicon of popular culture. But it is a scene constructed out of popular culture. It is a remake (homage, re-enactment, whatever you want to call it) of a scene from the 70s movie The Driver. Resampled into Tarantino’s movie the way a hip hop artist might resample multiple older tracks into a new song. Pulp Fiction is filled with homages like this: Bruce Willis being spotted by his gangster boss walking past his (Willis’s) car is a shot-for-shot remake of the same scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); the dance scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman is inspired by a similar dance scene in a cafe in Godard’s Bande a Part (1964); even the setup of the Travolta-Thurman section - a gangster taking his boss’s wife out on a date and things going wrong - reeks of the stories that were commonplace in the pulpy crime novels of America’s past. It is not only references but the soul and the subject matter of Tarantino’s films that are drawn from pop culture.
As Picasso is attributed as saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Tarantino would agree wholeheartedly.
* * *
Tarantino was a busy man in the 90s. He had the sole credit as writer/director of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (notice the obsession with two word titles) and that’s on top of writing True Romance, writing and starring in From Dusk Til Dawn, and being given a “story by” credit for Natural Born Killers for writing the original script, little of which made it into the movie. Tarantino’s “breakthrough” film was Pulp Fiction, which built on everything that had earned him attention with Reservoir Dogs: a colourful pop culture soundtrack; characters who have a tendency for monologue and chats about foot massages and McDonald’s; tense situations that culminate in quick and sudden moments of violence; and a story in which the chronology is messed up, a technique that may seem somewhat commonplace now but is only so because of the influence Tarantino had on filmmakers. Pulp Fiction wasn’t just a passing craze as its detractors claimed: it stands as a classic of crime, grindhouse and post-modern cinema.
Tarantino’s follow up, Jackie Brown, released in 1997 and is unique in the Tarantino cannon. It is the only one of his films that doesn’t take place in the Movieverse but feels set in the real world, or at least a real world of people who’ve watched a good few noir and blaxploitation films. This could be because it is the only Tarantino movie adapted from another source: Jackie Brown is adapted from Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. It is a slow, carefully paced film, stretching scenes out the way Sergio Leone, Tarantino’s favourite director, once did. There is little violence, with most focus on the characters and the ways they find to double cross one another. Many call Jackie Brown Tarantino’s best, debatable of course, but it is certainly his most restrained and unique movie.
After Jackie Brown, Tarantino took a six year hiatus, and there is a clear split between the movies that came before and came after. Some fans of his 90s output have never gotten on well with his post-hiatus movies. In his time away Tarantino bought into his own hype. His films since have played up to his image as much as Jackie Brown played it down. Violence is the clearest example: violence had always been part of the Tarantino discussion, but in the films violence had played more in the setups of scenes and stories than the execution of them. Tarantino had always appeared more interested in the situation that leads to someone getting shot than the shooting itself. When Bruce Willis stabs a man with a samurai sword in Pulp Fiction the camera cuts away. It is unclear if this was done for budgetary reasons or if it was a stylistic choice but either way it takes the focus away from the bloodiness of the things being acted out.
Compare this to Kill Bill released in 2003. It is a film of hyperviolence, where people explode in fountains of blood and floors are left carpeted with limbs. The premise: a woman, who we know only as The Bride, who worked as a killer-for-hire before escaping to a more normal life, is shot on her wedding day, her groom killed along with the whole of his family, and the baby she was pregnant with gone too, setting her off on an odyssey of revenge. Kill Bill is inspired by - right down to individual shots and characters - samurai movies and B-pictures of the past. And it’s a damn lot of fun. The movie is split into two “volumes” both very different from the other. Volume 1 is a bloodbath; the end fight scene is one of the greatest in cinema. Volume 2 is slower, more intimate, and puts great focus on a cast of characters who were only mildly explored in Volume 1. It’s an easy movie to like, while it is also easy to see why many fans were turned off by Tarantino’s change in style, especially considering the trajectory one could imagine him going in after Jackie Brown.
Every movie that has followed - Grindhouse, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight - has used this exaggerated style. Hyperviolent; cartoonish; tongue-in-cheek. Tarantino has played to his image instead of attempting to divert it. Pulp Fiction may have featured flashes of madness, but sequences such as when Travolta takes Thurman out on a date and they enter a dance competition are more than violence or witty dialogue - Tarantino used his mesh of pop culture to create something romantic and funny. He has never managed the same since. He has, in some of his recent movies, though, created some of the best genre films of recent times. Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s most elaborate and most rewarding movie, and The Hateful Eight is his darkest and most intense.
Tarantino’s next movie, planned for release next year, is about two men trying to make it big in the film industry during the time (and apparently involving) the Charles Manson murders. This, at first, might seem a leap from anything Tarantino has done before. But, as explained by Sophie Gilbert in a recent article for The Atlantic, Manson was a man spawned by the American culture of the 60s: he formed his “family” (i.e. cult) amid the hysteria of the counterculture movement, he used techniques he learned from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People to attract his followers, and he found immense fame (and even hardcore fans) due to the media attention he received following his arrest. On second thought, Manson is the perfect subject for a Tarantino movie.
* * *
Following the success of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino gained a level of celebrity not typically experienced by directors. He appeared on game shows and a roster of talk shows, and was the first director to gain a large fan following on internet communities (“The Church of Tarantino” was one such site in the 90s). And, ever since, his fingerprints have been all over the film industry: I once saw an interview with a professional script reader who warned anyone going into his line of work to get ready to read an endless onslaught of scripts about black-suited hitman who stylishly blow their targets away while discussing Madonna songs and fast food.
In interviews Tarantino is highly energetic. His films have, for more than two decades now, personified a particular brand of cool, yet seeing Tarantino interviewed instantly dispels this notion. He talks too fast, and too egotistically about his own work, and, in tibits regarding his personal life, he reveals he goes to the cinema alone to watch rom-coms and devotes a lot of spare time to buying copies of rare B-movies to watch in his home cinema and collecting board games based on 80s TV shows. Many filmmakers boast an encyclopedic knowledge and superhuman interest in film, Martin Scorsese for instance, but Scorsese has used this interest to create films about the real world, about religion, about his ancestry and about the Italian-American mob, Tarantino has used this interest to make movies about movies. And, because of this, it is easy to label Tarantino a film fanatic who never quite grew up; but then again, it is only a man of his temperament that could have created the films he has created.
* * *
Tarantino is the only director who, since the start of his career in 1992, has become a household name - a case could be made for Peter Jackson, and to a lesser extent J. J. Abrams, but both earned their fame directing blockbuster franchises that outweigh their own namesakes, whereas Tarantino is a sellable franchise by name alone. And, like all things that gain a large following, Tarantino has faced a large backlash. Love and hate for the man run equally deep, although it is undoubtedly a sign of something that he rarely conjures up mild opinions.
Here are the core arguments made against Tarantino’s work: 1) Tarantino never deals with “real” emotions or characters, instead hiding his films behind a wall of superficial violence and witty dialogue and a focus on “style over substance”. 2) His movies lack variety. 3) He is too reliant on movies from the past. 4) With his two most recent movies, both set in Southern states of North America, and both featuring slavery as a key plot point, some viewers (most vocally, fellow director Spike Lee) felt that Tarantino ignored dealing with serious issues in favour of using them as a backdrop for his genre films. In this case: westerns. 5) Tarantino’s filmography is front-heavy: his first two movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are better than anything that has proceeded them.
Most of these criticisms circle round the same idea: that he hasn’t grown as an artist. Pulp Fiction was a jolt to the system. It shook up what people were expecting from movies. I watched it years later, at maybe 13 years old, and it gave me the feeling there was a whole world of films I hadn’t seen and needed to because they might be as good as this one. It was only Tarantino’s second film and thus advertised a galaxy of possibilities of where he might go next, possibilities some people clearly think he never made use of. I believe this misses the point. Tarantino doesn’t need to make a love story or a true-life drama; at heart, he is still the video store clerk who wants to make bloody, witty movies featuring shots take from Sergio Leone movies and to be spoken of in the same sentences as Sam Peckinpah. Under that criteria, Tarantino has no equal.
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