My Tarantino Problem, and Yours

By Matt Zoller Seitz & Keith Uhlich

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1. The Air of Unreality
Keith Uhlich: Here. Read this. It’s from Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Nonfictions.

Matt Zoller Seitz: All right. (Reading aloud from text:)

“Objections of a more general nature can also be leveled against City Lights. Its lack of reality is comparable only to its equally exasperating lack of unreality. Some movies are true to life: For the Defense, Street of Chance, The Crowd, even The Broadway Melody, and some are willfully unrealistic, such as the highly individualistic films of Frank Borzage, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Eisenstein. Chaplin’s early escapades belong to the second type, undeniably based as they are on depthless photography and accelerated action, as well as on the actors’ fake mustaches, absurd false beards, fright wigs and ominous overcoats. Not attaining such unreality, City Lights remains unconvincing. Except for the luminous blind girl, extraordinary in her beauty, and for Charlie himself, always a rake, always disguised, all the film’s characters are recklessly normal. Its ramshackle plot relies on the disjointed techniques of continuity from 20 years ago. Archaism and anachronism are literary modes too, I know, but to handle them intentionally is different from perpetrating them ineptly. I relinquish my hope, so often unfulfilled, of being wrong.”

Okay!

KU: I’m citing this passage to get at the idea of unreality in Tarantino, because you said that you often had a problem believing in the worlds he’s created, that you miss the religious element or the spiritual element that I think apply to them. I use that Borges quote as a justification for my point of view, primarily because of the one section where Borges talks about attaining an unreality.

Yet I think that part of the passage also supports your point of view because maybe the Kill Bill films, or Reservoir Dogs -- or any of Tarantino’s films -- don’t attain the air of unreality that allow you yourself to feel the reality of the situation. Whereas they do for me.

We’re entering into this conversation coming from antithetical perspectives.

MZS: Yeah, and we’re kind of jumping into the deep end of the pool. And that’s OK, because what you’re describing is the crux of what I call “My Tarantino Problem.” We’ve been having this argument for about a year now, and at one point I told you that I was going to write a piece called “My Tarantino Problem,” and that you might as well follow it up with a rebuttal titled, “Your Tarantino Problem.” We never got around to that, but here we are now, so let’s just get it out here, and follow it at the very end with a discussion of Grindhouse.

By way of background, the first Tarantino movie I reviewed was Reservoir Dogs, back when I was a critic for New Times newspapers. I said at the time, when it came out after an advance wave of publicity declaring him the next great American filmmaker, that yes, it was entertaining, yes it was very clever, but there was something secondhand about it. It seemed to me an exceptional example of the tough guy movie, of the gangster film, but there was something glib about it that rubbed me the wrong way. I guess you could call the review backhandedly positive.

Then Pulp Fiction came out, when I’d been a professional journalist for about three years, and a lead film critic for about a year. I really fell for that movie. I saw it several times in the theater, and I remember being very strongly influenced by a Sight and Sound article about Tarantino that hit newsstands right around the time of the Cannes Film Festival, which awarded the movie its grand prize. I remember on first viewing being bothered by certain elements of the movie, including pacing problems and the film’s attitude toward violence, which I thought was too comical – there wasn’t enough weight to it – and just a general sense that what I was seeing were not hit men and boxers and gangsters’ trophy wives, but rather a video store clerk’s conception of them based on having seen them in other movies.

But the movie was so exciting, and so interesting for the way that it merged Hollywood and American art house and exploitation and academic elements, that my review barely touched on the aspects that bugged me -- maybe because I was young, the movie was being hailed as a masterpiece by much more established critics who I thought were quite smart, and I wanted to cover my ass in case my elders were drawing on a base of knowledge I just didn’t have yet, which seemed very possible, considering that I was still finding my way.

That nagging feeling came back years later as I was watching parts of Jackie Brown, which I think is still his most mature film, for all its problems. And they resurfaced again when I watched the Kill Bill movies. A lot of the things that didn’t sit right with me when I watched his last three features were also present, in some form, in Pulp Fiction. There was a lesson in there, and I think it was something like, “Trust your instincts.”

My Tarantino problem in a nutshell is that I recognize the things that he’s trying to do, and I concede that if the goal is to create an entertaining movie that is very much about other movies and very much informed by film history, then Tarantino has to be considered a major, major success, there’s no doubt about it; but as I get a little older, and get further away from my twenties, I look back on my positive review of Pulp Fiction, and I cringe a little bit, because what I’ve come to value in movies more than anything else is emotion, and a sense of connection to life. That is the one thing that I think is consistently missing from Tarantino's movies, with a couple of exceptions, which I think we’ll get to as we go through his career film by film.
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2. Fire and Brimstone
KU: Reservoir Dogs I count as a big influence in my life. It was the movie that sort of shocked me into wanting to be a critic. To further my spiritual-religious descriptor: I recently re-watched all of Tarantino's work and they seemed like an old school preacher talking at you, really preaching with fire and brimstone.

MZS: Reservoir Dogs? Really?

KU: Yes. Absolutely. And not just Reservoir Dogs -- the whole body of work has to me a revival tent, old-school-religious feel: in its sanguine nature, in its passion and enthusiasm, and also in its more troubling aspects.

I don’t want to come across as a blind Tarantino acolyte. I admit there are problematic things in all his movies that I am willing to accept as part of his contradictions. But his movies are inherently contradictory in that way. Reservoir Dogs is probably the most perfectly structured and leanest of them all--

MZS: Absolutely.

KU: You know what, though? I’m going to take that back. One of the things I appreciated when I re-viewed all the movies is what I'll call The Tarantino Longeurs, which are the very quiet moments, the "boring" moments, that lull you into complacency before the punch line. Everything comes clear for me. There’s a sense of illumination and I get a chill out of it.

MZS: I would never use religious language to describe Tarantino. You’ve got to not only have, but be able to communicate, feeling, in order to convey that sensibility, and I just don’t think Tarantino has it in him. He believes in the gospel of movies, no doubt. I think his taste is incredibly eclectic, and I admire that. But I could list – and I might as well go ahead and do it right here – the moments that have moved me in Tarantino films.

There’s Harvey Keitel cradling Tim Roth in his arms at the end of Reservoir Dogs. There’s the flashback, or the visualization, in Reservoir Dogs, of Tim Roth in the bathroom with the police dog coming in. There’s John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson walking out of the diner at the end of Pulp Fiction, and the dance between Travolta and Uma Thurman. In Jackie Brown, almost any scene involving Robert Forster, and the expressions on Robert DeNiro’s face as his character comes to grips with his attraction to Bridget Fonda’s character. And in the Kill Bill movies, really nothing, except for the anime section in Kill Bill, Volume 1, which ironically for me is the only chapter of those two movies that attains that kind of excessive, operatic emotion that Sergio Leone attained routinely in his spaghetti westerns, which are an acknowledged and probably primary influence on the Kill Bill films.

That last item on the list tells me all I need to know about Tarantino: the only scene in both parts of Kill Bill that felt truly overwhelming to me – overwhelming and excessive in a good way – was the scene that Tarantino essentially subcontracted to another filmmaker.

That, in a nutshell, is my Tarantino problem. His technical proficiency, his sense of play, his sense of film history, his wide-ranging taste, the democratic spirit that is Quentin Tarantino, all demand to be acknowledged. But there’s something missing. I like many filmmakers who are in the vein of Tarantino. I adore the Coen brothers, and they’re often accused of being artificial, and I’m doing some writing about Wes Anderson right now, who wouldn’t exist if not for Tarantino and the Coens. But Wes Anderson and the Coens – and for that matter, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, who are also highly, highly, highly stylized, contraptionist filmmakers have all moved me more than Tarantino. Even when their movies are overscaled, overcontrolled or boring, they touch my feelings in a way that Tarantino doesn’t. If Tarantino’s a preacher, I’d say he’s Elmer Gantry. I don’t believe in anything he says.

KU: I do believe, and continue to. Reservoir Dogs was important to me as a teenager – and this is going to sound crazy – in the way that Spaceballs was important to me as a child.

MZS: How so?

KU: Spaceballs was one of the videos I rented the most. That’s my video store clerk mentality coming out here. I saw it seven times on video, I loved it so much. I went into the video store to rent it again and there was literally one last copy up there on the shelf. Somebody else had just taken it, so I walked up to this person and grabbed the Spaceballs cassette from them because I wanted to see it an eighth time.

MZS: You never know what’s going to give you a revelation.

KU: And that film gave me a revelation when I was very young. Then I was going through middle school, and I somehow heard about Akira Kurosawa, and I said to my parents, “Let’s do a Kurosawa film festival,” just because I had heard of him, and I started bringing home Kurosawa films on tape. Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992. That was post-middle school, early high school, a very important time for me developmentally. And Reservoir Dogs shocked me out of some kind of complacency. I credit it with putting me on and pushing me down the road toward being a film critic.

MZS: What did Reservoir Dogs do to you, or show to you, that was so significantly different from anything you’d experienced before that it prompted you to reconsider your life and think about what you wanted to do with it? I ask that because – and I don’t think you’d disagree with this – Tarantino’s career is very much about borrowing and repurposing film history. By which I mean, a lot of the stuff you saw in Reservoir Dogs you’d probably seen before, in some other form.

KU: Or I was being prepared for it. People say about Tarantino -- and I want to be careful here and not make blanket statements about groups of people, because I did that the last time we had one of these conversations -- I do see a sort of group mentality that attacks Tarantino, that says his appropriations turn minds off to film history, and not just film history.

MZS: I have heard that -- that if Tarantino’s such a boon to film history, why aren’t Godard DVDs flying off the shelves?

KU: The charge is that Tarantino’s work does not make people want to seek out the other stuff, the movies that inspired him. But Tarantino’s work does make me want to seek out the other stuff. The Shaw Brothers logo at the beginning of Kill Bill actually made me seek out the Shaw Brothers films, and it helped inform me as to what he was trying to do in the Kill Bill movies. Reservoir Dogs, maybe Jean-Pierre Melville could be compared to that. But back to your question, which is, what was different about Reservoir Dogs? For starters, there’s the copious amount of blood. It’s a very sanguine movie. It is soaked in blood -- Tim Roth especially.

MZS: Tim Roth seems to spend about half the movie bleeding.

KU: He does. Then there was the jumping back and forth within the story. I know now that this had been done before in other movies. But put yourself in my position -- this was entirely new to me, this jumping around chronologically. I can hear the cinephiles now, saying, “Oh, what a sad child, to have experienced Tarantino before Godard.”

MZS: Well, you gotta start somewhere.

KU: The movie showed me this structure that I had never seen before, and it showed me this really vicious, bloody vision. Like the title says: Reservoir Dogs. They’re going at each other in the gutter. God is in all of Tarantino’s movies. Reservoir Dogs is very much about looking down at these men going at each other, and essentially destroying each other.

However, at the same time, it’s funny, but I think I had always misread the end of Reservoir Dogs until I watched it again just a few days ago. When Roth is saying, “I’m a cop,” and Keitel points the gun at his head, I always thought Roth was trying to talk Keitel out of shooting him. The last time I watched it, it seemed that instead of [Roth] saying, “I’m sorry. What are you doing? Don’t do that!” he was saying, “Do it. I want to be with you.”

MZS: The brilliance of that ending is that it can be read more than one way. I’ve had conversations with people about the meaning of the words and gestures in that scene, and there isn’t one answer, just as there is no one answer to the question, “Why did Travis Bickle shoot all those people?”_____________________
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3. God in Tarantino

KU: If I see the presence of God in Tarantino’s work, it comes primarily through the idea of beatification.

MZS: How so?

KU: Faces. And what faces mean.

I’ll give you some examples from the movies. The dolly-in to Keitel’s face at the end of Reservoir Dogs. In Jackie Brown, Pam Grier, both the opening side profile, and the final shot of the movie, looking at her face. In Pulp Fiction, Travolta’s ecstasy after he shoots up. And from Tarantino’s CSI episode, "Grave Danger" where one of the CSI members is buried alive -- by John Saxon of all people, which tickles me to no end --

MZS: Appropriate given his exploitation pedigree--

KU: -- and this video feed comes up showing the buried CSI member accompanied by The Turtles' song "Outside Chance". Tarantino then does these individual close-ups of the CSI team looking at the feed, and coupled with the song -- whether or not you think these television actors can necessarily project or not -- the end result is profound, soulful. I got that out of it anyway. Someone once criticized Jackie Brown in a class I was auditing. She said that when she saw that close-up of Pam Grier, all she got out of it was that Tarantino enjoyed looking at her. She was saying, “I don’t get it, I don’t get it.” I wanted to just say, “Yes, he likes looking at her, but he also likes what she emanates.” There’s something that comes from her, some kind of soulfulness that also comes from Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies.

MZS: It’s interesting that you say that, because I think that Tarantino unquestionably appreciates the personalities of actors, their senses of humor, their idiosyncrasies, and as far as photographing their faces, yeah, he has his moments. But I often feel that he’s seeing them primarily as objects to be photographed. I don’t get the same sense, consistently, of a life force emanating out of them.

You bring up Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. One of the major failures of that movie is Grier’s performance. I don’t believe it’s her fault. Quentin Tarantino was her director, and he should have given her more direction, or different direction, but there’s a sense in that movie of her being treated as an icon, and in the context of that particular movie, her iconic status is not elaborated upon enough for my taste. Perhaps what we needed in that movie was not Pam Grier the blaxploitation icon, or the kind of street-level feminist figure, but a woman -- just a real woman, a person who compliments Robert Forster’s character. That long final close-up scored to “Across 110th Street,” which a lot of people think makes the movie, to me exposes everything that’s wrong with the movie -- a movie that I like a great deal, in spite of the many, many aspects of it that I have problems with. I’m looking at the face of an actress driving a car while a song plays, and I’m not getting any sense of reflection from the movie or from her.

Again, it’s not Grier’s fault. The woman can act. But in that movie, she’s put on a pedestal too much.

KU: I don’t agree. Dan Callahan and I are friendly with James Harvey, who wrote Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges and Movie Love in the Fifties. He’s told us how great he thinks Jackie Brown is. This is a man in his seventies who had never seen Pam Grier before that movie. He said he was so taken with Pam Grier that he’s writing a full chapter on her in an upcoming book on actresses.

MZS: I have the same issue with Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, actually. I feel about her performance the way I feel about Leonardo DiCaprio in his first two films for Martin Scorsese -- meaning I understand why his involvement was necessary in order for the films to exist, but I wish there were someone else in those parts.

KU: You feel the same way about Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette, right?

MZS: Yeah.

KU: That’s one of the aspects of criticism that we can’t really do anything about. If someone says, “I don’t really like Uma Thurman,” or “I don’t get it,” well, what can I fuckin’ do? I can’t do anything. It’s like, “Well, if you don’t like it…”

MZS: “…don’t watch the movie?”

KU: No! Not, “Don’t watch the movie.” Never that. Maybe there is no finish to that sentence, at least none that I can express for others.

I will say that I don’t think Uma Thurman works in the same soulful way that Pam Grier does in Jackie Brown. But I want to bring up a quote from a review of Kill Bill, Volume 2. The critic, whose review I can't find and whose name I can't recall, natch, said that after Kill Bill 2, he understood what Tarantino was trying to do with Kill Bill 1, and that they needed to be wedded. I think that’s true – they need to be seen together, because they’re really one film. He said, “Tarantino’s enthusiasm is infectious.” I think “infectious” is the key word here, because with Tarantino, it really is like a virus.

MZS: Talk about a statement that can be interpreted in more than one way.

KU: Exactly. It’s like, “Do you like being sick with this man’s mind and this man’s soul and this man’s heart, or do you not?” A lot of people reject it and a lot of people really love it. I really love it.
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4. "Come back here, you silly duck!"
KU: To come back to Reservoir Dogs, the first time I saw it, when that ending hit, when Keitel is blown out of frame and it cuts to the credits and the Harry Nilsson song “Coconut”, I don’t know if I can begin to describe how shaken up I was by that. It was an epiphany. I suppose it’s possible that even now I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because of how much he means to me for showing me a path.

MZS: That’s an entirely legitimate way to feel, though.

KU: I think so. When I reviewed Kill Bill for Slant, I brought up Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which is a real hodgepodge of things, a gestalt, a Rorschach. Mason and Dixon are sailing calmly along on the ocean, then suddenly they’re smoking pot with George Washington, or a flying duck comes in, with a French chef chasing after it and screaming, “Haw haw haw, come back here, you silly duck!”

MZS: That’s the same sense of play that W.C. Fields had in his movies.

KU: That’s what I was trying to get at with the Borges quote – that underneath all that is the profundity of pleasure, which I think also comes from sources as diverse as the Marx Brothers and Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes movie. Jonathan Rosenbaum said of Reservoir Dogs, "It's unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it..." I understand what he’s talking about. But I genuinely believe that I can like someone like Abbas Kiarostami and someone like Quentin Tarantino and feel the profundity in both -- that they don’t have to cancel each other out.

MZS: They’re coming at you from different directions.

KU: They really are. The thing is, I do think they have a similarly serious approach to examining life. But Tarantino’s idea of life is something that a lot of people have problems with, because it is so sealed within movies. That’s who he is. And that’s what I ask from an artist. If he’s being honest about his own perceptions of life, then I go with him.

MZS: But if you’re essentially confessing, in movie after movie, that you apparently have no understanding of life except that which you’ve absorbed from watching movies, then I’m not sure that’s something you want to be confessing to.

KU: But I don’t think Tarantino is saying that, either. I think his life is heavily influenced by movies, but also by his upbringing, which he’s brought up in interviews.

MZS: I don’t doubt that certain movies meant a great deal to him at critical junctures in his life, in the same way that Tarantino’s movies meant a great deal to you, and to me, at certain points in our lives. But that’s not really getting at what bugs me about his movies. What bugs me about his movies is the lack not only of empathy but of any genuine feeling of any kind -- with certain exceptions that I’ve already listed -- throughout his whole filmography.

When I reviewed Kill Bill, Volume 1 for NYPress, I complained among other things about the fact that I felt like I was seeing too much of a series of set pieces, too much of a series of quotes, too much of a tour of his influences, and that the material was not transformed enough to stand on its own. It felt like a movie that needed footnotes. And I didn’t say a word about the violence, because frankly, it was so over the top, but so totally disconnected from anything real that it barely registered with me, apart from the way it was staged and shot. The following week, Armond White made a parenthetical reference to the movie in a review of something else, saying “Tarantino kills with a jackal’s glee.” That was completely off the mark, not because Tarantino has a healthy attitude about the meaning of violence and its impact on the psyche, but because Tarantino has no feelings about violence at all, apart from appreciating its usefulness in jazzing people up or getting a character from Point A to Point B. Compare him to Oliver Stone or Martin Scorsese or even Steven Soderbergh, and I don’t see any particular attitude at all. I would love to be able to argue with Tarantino’s presentation of violence, his attitude toward violence. But I really couldn’t tell you what it is, after all these years.

That’s what bothered me even the first time I saw Pulp Fiction, although at the time I discounted those misgivings, and I shouldn’t have. When Marvin gets shot in the car, by accident, it’s very much like the rest of Pulp Fiction, and the rest of Tarantino’s work, in that it’s comical, and the sense of humor is superficially very Scorsesean. It’s bloody, savage violence, and the callousness with which characters address -- or just as often don’t address -- the violence is the source of tension and excitement in the movie. But where Tarantino differs from Scorsese is that while Scorsese sometimes succumbs to a savage impulse, he always has an attitude about it, namely that people who behave this way are monsters -- they’re missing something. It doesn’t mean they have no human qualities or that they don’t have interesting characteristics, but it does mean that we should not get too comfortable with them. Scorsese never allowed us to get too comfortable with the characters in GoodFellas, which to this day remains one of the primary influences on all of Tarantino’s work. But Tarantino’s missing something about Scorsese. In GoodFellas the disjunction between the excitement of the filmmaking and the protagonist’s dry, kind of bored, retrospective narration told you all you needed to know about Scorsese’s attitude toward the material, which was, “Yes, it’s an exciting life, but these people are sociopaths, and their lives are all about power and getting what you want when you want it, damn the consequences.”

In contrast, Pulp Fiction is centered on a couple of guys who kill people for a living, and it’s presented, more so than any other film about assassins that I can recall, as a morally neutral skill or trade, like being a plumber or a golf pro. I am not an especially moralistic critic -- I don’t think the purpose of movies is to educate us on the proper way to live -- but I object to that. And I sense that strain running through all of Tarantino’s work.

I don’t get that from many of the other habitually violent directors that are recognized as important, including Sergio Leone, who I keep coming back to because of his huge influence on the Kill Bill films. Leone’s movies are filled with violence. The violence is very operatic, even cartoonish. But it’s got gravity. When people get killed, it matters, if not necessarily to the person dying (a lot of them are cannon fodder), then certainly to the person doing the killing. And when it doesn’t seem to matter, that’s when it matters most of all. Eastwood’s poker face as he kills people isn’t saying to the viewer, “This doesn’t matter.” It’s saying, “This character has become so comfortable with killing that it doesn’t matter to him anymore.” That gives the action scenes, as fun as they are, an undertone of sadness. Leone’s films are extravagant and unreal, and they can be silly, but the attitude towards suffering and cruelty is always serious. His movies have soul. Tarantino has tried many times, but I think he has yet to give us a moment as tender as the one in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where the Man with No Name comforts a dying soldier, or a character as tragic as Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel in For a Few Dollars More, who at first seems like a heartless bounty hunter, but is actually driven by an overwhelming sense of loss.

Compare Leone’s violence to the temple sequence at the end of the first Kill Bill. I really did feel as if I was watching someone else play a videogame. There were oceans of blood spilled, but I didn’t feel nauseous. I didn’t feel anything, really. I just looked at my watch.

KU: Part of that, I think, stems from the fact that the movies were released separately. They need to be seen as one film. When you see them together, the patterns, the doublings of things, the poetic rhymes of certain actors playing one character at one end of the story and another character at the other end, the symmetrical aspects – which I likened in my review to the yin and yang symbol – become clearer, and they’re very important to what Tarantino is doing. When David Carradine is monologuing about the fish flopping on the carpet, and how the daughter squished it, it’s connected to the chapter prior, where the Bride squishes Elle Driver's eyeball beneath her foot.

I realize some people just don’t see that as being simpatico. They don’t feel that these things are connected. They feel it’s disjointed between chapters that exist independently of each other. But it plays as a whole to me.

MZS: The closest I’ve watched them together was a couple of days apart. I didn’t immediately connect the fish and the eyeball as you just have. That said, there’s a difference between the act of linking things metaphorically and poetically and actually having them achieve their intended effect.

Another filmmaker who really foregrounds style, and believes that style equals substance, is Darren Aronofsky. His second feature, Requiem for a Dream, I liked a lot, but one of the things I didn’t like about his next film, The Fountain, was that I was aware of, and did admire, the repetitions, the plants, the payoffs, the recurring images, the themes, the reiteration of the themes, but I didn’t feel that they added up to what Aronofsky wanted them to add up to. I know there are many people who disagree and think The Fountain is one of the best movies they’ve ever seen. But it didn’t do it for me. I admired the handiwork in the way that you can admire a well-crafted chair, but it didn’t move me. And that movie of all movies should have fucking moved me. You know?

KU: I understand, and that gets at my hesitation in having this discussion. A lot of the people who’ve shaped me as a critic, people whose opinions I respect – you, Armond, and friends like Jeremiah Kipp and Ed Gonzalez – don’t like Tarantino. And for whatever reason, when I hear that, I feel this twinge of, “What am I missing here?” I blame that on feelings of inadequacy, which I think everyone feels at certain times. But I also wonder if I am being willfully blind because of how I feel Tarantino himself influenced me.

But still I hold to the conviction that what Reservoir Dogs did to me was important, and I think, “Don’t belittle it. Don’t think less of it.” There is something very important about that. I listen to your arguments. I see --

MZS: But you don’t agree.

KU: Theoretically, I can see them. But --

MZS: I know what you mean. In Tarantino’s case, I hear the words and the melody, but I’m not feeling the music. The way that you feel when people run down Tarantino is the way I feel when I hear people complain that Wes Anderson’s movies are too cute and flashy, or that the Coen brothers are all style and no substance, that they have no heart, that they’re insincere in some way. It’s like a knife in the heart.

KU: It is like a knife in the heart.

MZS: I feel like, “How can you watch The Man Who Wasn’t There and say that?”

KU: And I feel like, “How can you watch Jackie Brown and say that?” That movie to me is perfection. Dan was saying to me the other day that it reminded him of late Howard Hawks, in its improvisational style and its languorous, “We’ll get there eventually” rhythms.

MZS: I do admire that about Tarantino – the fact that he seems blithely unconcerned with playing by the usual rhythmic rules.

KU: You have used, and I have used, the word “maturity” in discussions of this type. That’s a word that’s often been used in criticisms of Steven Spielberg. “Why aren’t you more mature? Follow this path, grow up, stop being a child.” Here I’m talking about another group mentality that I see. Tarantino makes Jackie Brown, and critics say, “Oh, he’s finally matured.” Then he makes the Kill Bill movies and it’s, “Oh, now he’s an adolescent. He’s regressed.” I don’t believe that at all. I think he’s following his heart and his muse, whether we like it or not, as I believe Spielberg is doing as well.
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5. "We'll get there eventually."
MZS: The question remains, in making Kill Bill, was he working something out of his system, or did those films represent his blood and his bone marrow? In Kill Bill, I think it’s option number two.

KU: It’s his INLAND EMPIRE.

MZS: Wow. To quote Quentin, that’s a bold statement.

KU: I only mean that in the sense that Kill Bill expresses a very strong aspect of his personality. He’s wearing different skins – different skins of the filmmakers he has watched. Whether you consider that valid or not, that filmmaking mentality is easily imitated, and like Spielberg, who has also been imitated ad nauseum, the imitators tend to cast a negative light on the original.

MZS: They often imitate the most superficial aspects of the source.

KU: I believe, however, that Tarantino, love him or hate him, is a unique, individual artist. He’s wearing different skins, but channeling those influences through his own perceptions.

MZS: He is still, at heart, a video store clerk. I’ve used that as a rap against him, but you could also say it’s praise.

KU: I hear Susan Sontag despised him. To her he was the wrong kind of cinephile. I think we need to get away from that. I have a problem with anything that tries to eradicate another point of view. Tarantino never wants to eradicate another point of view. If anything, he’s too generous.

MZS: In the abstract, I like what Tarantino represents, as an eclectic, democratic movie spirit -- and I say that setting aside his unfortunate tendency to act, which I hope he’ll get past. Sitting through his star turn in Wait Until Dark on Broadway was like having Novocaine injected into my eyes and ears. What it comes back to is the movies. Yeah, I suppose one could say that Tarantino’s brand of cinephilia might not inspire a lot of people to go out and check the source – to rent a Godard movie. It’s more likely that they’ll rent a Shaw brothers movie or a blaxploitation movie, because frankly, they’re much more accessible and in the end, much less lasting. But one could also say that the number one reason the shelf lives of certain exploitation films has been prolonged is Quentin Tarantino.

KU: I would say with the Shaws, there are a good number that have stood the test of time. And the end of Kill Bill 2 does remind me of some of Eric Rohmer’s movies, not necessarily in terms of the subject, but in terms of the ephiphanic moments in conversation.

MZS: I agree with that. I’ll also say that the same arguments you cite – that Tarantino makes movies that extinguish curiosity rather than awaken it – were also used against Spielberg and George Lucas in the 1970s, that a person watching Jaws or Close Encounters or the original Star Wars film might not be inclined to seek out Alfred Hitchcock, or Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, or John Ford's The Searchers, or Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or the myriad other works that fed those guys’ imaginations. But that's not necessarily true. I’m living proof of that. You’re proof of that. Yes, there are tens of millions of people who watched Star Wars and never thought to watch The Searchers to see where the Tattooine sequences came from. But others did.

And if they did or didn’t, so what?

KU: I think we all sometimes think movies have more power than they actually do. There are examples of movies directly affecting behavior – e.g.: Birth of a Nation spurring the re-establishment of the KKK – but I would say that’s probably an anomalous example. Movies were so new back then that they had a more immediate and wide impact. We’re so used to movies now that they’ve become a more individualist pursuit. I recognize that 300 is a phenomenon, but I don’t see it spurring the kind of rise in anti-Iranian sentiment in this country that The Birth of a Nation inspired against blacks.

MZS: I think it’s a bad idea to force Tarantino to carry a responsibility to educate the filmgoing public. We come back to the video store clerk mentality. The clerk can say, “This is a good movie, you should check it out,” but it’s up to you to do it.
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6. Illumination
MZS: What I want from Tarantino is a palpable, identifiable sense of what he believes, about life on this earth, about how people interact with one another, that is identifiable apart from the quotations from film history. I understand his attitude toward certain archetypes that are familiar from other movies – certain modes, certain genres, certain styles. That’s crystal clear.

But there are a lot of filmmakers who give me that, all through history. Orson Welles and Kurosawa give me that. Wes Anderson and the Coens give me that. The Coens are a good counterexample to Tarantino. Tarantino would not exist without the Coens, who perfected that kind of accessible, funny, “Here we go on a tour through film history” movie, but also counterbalanced that sensibility with a sense of how humans behave, with definable opinions on what sort of behavior is useful and productive and good, and what’s evil and venal and trivial. You see those interests reflected in film after Coen brothers film. The Ladykillers got a number of poisonous reviews, but the morality of that film is as clear as Raising Arizona’s. The Coens are not, strictly speaking, moralists. Their movies aren’t moralistic, but they are about morality, or in the case of Miller’s Crossing and The Man Who Wasn’t There, moral relativity and the mechanics of moral codes.

Not every film needs to be about moral choice, but I do think the presence of moral choice is one of the qualities that distinguishes films of great directors from merely interesting ones. I don’t see a whole lot of that going on in Tarantino. If I’m wrong, tell me.

KU: His idea of life is that it’s a mish-mash. It’s a mish-mash of styles, a mish-mash of moods that butt up against each other and either mix or seem antithetical. Watching Kill Bill – and maybe this is why I called it his Inland Empire/psychological examination – there are scenes that are just extremely raw, like when the Bride wakes up and finds that her baby is not there. That’s performed, I would say, very realistically.

MZS: It is, and that’s probably the strongest moment in both movies, I think, besides the anime sequence.

KU: But that butts up against those redneck guys coming in and trying to rape her, which is done in a very comical, extreme way, and that butts up against the anime sequence – the Rise of O-Ren Ishii – and then there’s O-Ren having her American Chinese heritage called into question in front of the Yakuza and cutting off Boss Tanaka's head. She’s very abrasive, and that abrasiveness is very American in some ways; Lucy Liu is an abrasive personality, and very well-cast in that particular role. When she dies, though, or is about to die, she apologizes to the Bride for having made fun of her earlier – after having been reduced to an American stereotype, she takes on a very Japanese quality; I'm uncomfortable making those sorts of generalized statements about nations, but that's what I got out of it. Then there’s the reverence of the Sonny Chiba sword-making scene, which is performed pretty much straight, treated as a holy ritual and rite – at first he sort of plays to the Bride as being a silly American valley girl. Then when he realizes she’s not, they begin talking on a whole other level.

MZS: Well, now you’re giving me pause, because one of the things I say over and over is that one of the surefire signs that a filmmaker is worth taking seriously is when you watch their movies and for long stretches of it you’re entirely sure if they’re kidding or not. Tarantino absolutely fits the bill. How serious is he?

KU: You don’t know. Then there’s the whole Pai Mei sequence -- and here’s where we get into the doubling thing. Both Gordon Liu and Michael Parks play two roles in the Kill Bill movies: Liu is Johnny Mo, the leader of the Crazy 88's in Volume 1 and Pai Mei in Volume 2 (simple dichotomy, bad guy-good guy). Parks plays Sheriff Earl McGraw in Volume 1, very much a redneck stereotype, then comes back in Volume 2 as Esteban Vihaio, the pimp. At the first the tenor of his performance is in the same comical vein as Earl McGraw, but then there’s that interesting moment where he calls the waitress over, and you see that he’s slashed her face up. Tarantino doesn’t make that into a joke. A character who we initially thought was a stereotype of a pimp has been given some extra weight.

And there’s the way that Bill in the first movie is a ghost, a godlike presence hanging overhead shooting down at The Bride, but in the second movie, or the second half, he comes down to earth, and you see him, or at least I see him, as a man. You also see Tarantino doing this with the Gordon Liu characters. All these roles, these doublings inform each other. If you realize it’s the same actor playing two roles, you realize the connection between things, and the resonance of what they mean comes out of that as well.

Then there's Volume 2's buried alive sequence, which is really wonderful as well. It brings this discussion back to the religious metaphor that I often cite from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It's my favorite Indiana Jones movie primarily because of Sean Connery’s line at the end, when Indy asks him, “What did you find, Dad?” and he says, “Me? Illumination.” That word, illumination, explains how I view movies, and there's a sense of illumianation in the buried alive sequence of Kill Bill, Volume 2. When the Bride wakes up in the truck, the movie, which has been in the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio throughout, is for a moment in the more squarish ratio of 1:33:1, as if to emphasize the Bride's claustrophobia, the haze she’s waking up into. Then Budd and his accomplice pull her out of the truck and the image shoots back to 2:35. Then she’s buried alive and they give her the flashlight, and she turns it on and hits against the coffin, and it knocks the light out. She gets really scared for a second, then manages to knock it back on. Her anxiety increases, then it subsides, and she eventually gets to a calm place and turns the light off – into darkness – and at that point, after a brief chapter title, a campfire illuminates the center of the frame. Then, after that illumination, you see Bill and the Bride, and then it goes into his whole story about Pai Mei ("Once upon a time in China...), which I now connect to Bill’s later story about Superman. That’s a very conscious juxtaposition of Western mythology, Superman, versus Eastern mythology, Pai Mei. Tarantino believes in both of them.

MZS: Not only can I see what you’re saying, I can actually see the movie as you’re describing it. But I wanted that scene where she’s buried alive and then comes out – as she must because she’s the heroine of the movie – to be revelatory and powerful, and it wasn’t for me. There are a number of reasons why it wasn’t.

This is a rap against Tarantino that you may consider unfair, but I’ve never seen an inside-the-coffin sequence done better than at the end of the original version of The Vanishing. When I saw a version of that scene being set up in Kill Bill, I said to myself, “Quentin Tarantino loves The Vanishing.” And that’s a reaction I have to a lot of his appropriations. Not only was the scene not as disturbing as the one in The Vanishing, I didn’t feel a revelation in her character, because I did not feel there was a character there who could experience a revelation. I liken the experience to what I felt when I saw that very long closeup of Dirk Diggler near the end of Boogie Nights, in the drug-deal-gone-bad sequence with the Alfred Molina character. It’s a very slow dolly-in on Dirk as he’s realizing something – but what? What is he realizing that this stupid kid shouldn’t have figured out much earlier in this nearly three-hour movie? That he’s in a very bad situation and needs to get out of it? The extravagance of the director’s presentation doesn’t match up with the substance of what’s being revealed.

Added to that, from a craft standpoint, I realize that in cutting away from that intensely claustrophobic sequence to a flashback, Tarantino was going for the movie equivalent of jumping from one chapter of a novel to another. In a novel, it’s perfectly acceptable to cut away from a very suspenseful episode in the heroine’s life to give us a flashback and then return to that moment. But in a movie, it’s like taking a hamburger away when you’re half done eating it. It was frustrating for me, and the fact that it was clearly intended to frustrate doesn’t automatically mean it’s a good decision on Tarantino’s part. For me that decision drives home the fact that the whole Kill Bill saga is an example of a director aestheticizing the life right out of the very genres he purports to celebrate. It's the pokiest, least urgent revenge movie I’ve ever seen. Which, I will grant, might be the point.

KU: The climax of the Kill Bill story really comes at the end of the first half, in the House of Blue Leaves. If you want to talk about it as a revenge movie, as Yin-Yang, then the first half is her ascension to goddess and superhero, and the second movie is about the descent, to the penultimate scene in Volume 2 where she’s lying on the bathroom floor in the same prostrate position she was in when she was shot by Bill – only now, instead of being prostrate before her former lover, she’s prostrate before God. And she says “Thank you,” to someone I think is God.

In a way, that moment rhymes with the Sonny Chiba scene in the first movie, the one where he tells the Bride, speaking of the sword, “If on your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut.” What’s funny about that -- and why I like the Sonny Chiba scene so much -- is that he says, “I can tell you with no ego, this is my finest sword.” The key words there are, “Without ego.” I believe the character is saying that line without ego. I also believe he is saying, “God will be cut” without ego.

That’s an interesting moment to consider, because Tarantino’s public persona is all about ego, and unfortunately, he’s so ubiquitous and so enthusiastic that the idea of egocentricity is applied to his movies by people who have witnessed his behavior in reality. That’s unfortunate, because there’s more to his movies than there is to his public persona.

MZS: I agree. Spike Lee has the same problem. The fact that Lee cast Tarantino in Girl 6 as the director who makes Theresa Randle take her top off in the audition says to me that both guys have a degree of self-awareness, and a sense of humor, about being The Director.
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7. The Quentin Tarantino Show
MZS: There are problematic aspects of Tarantino’s work that are clearly intentional, but the fact that they’re intentional doesn’t make them all right.

One example is Tarantino’s use of the word “nigger.” I don’t think it’s earned. I didn’t think it was appropriate in Reservoir Dogs, which was more fantastic than realistic; there, it feels to me like a bad judgment call by a guy who’s seen Scorsese movies. Tarantino doesn’t seem to understand that in Scorsese’s movies, that word is used to demonstrate a particular mentality of particular people who exist in a real world, who come from a certain social strata, and who are bigoted by nature of where they come from. In Reservoir Dogs, I feel like I’m watching a movie by a guy who has seen a lot of tough guy movies and has decided that tough guys talk that way. The cameo he gives himself in Pulp Fiction is just horrible -- badly acted and badly judged.

And I can tell you right away, without even having asked Tarantino, where that decision came from: Tarantino idolizes Scorsese, and in Taxi Driver, Scorsese has a cameo as one of Travis Bickle's more loathsome passengers, a guy who's obsessed that his wife is having an affair with a black man and wants to kill her for it. He has Travis drive him over to the man's apartment, and they sit there looking up at his window, and he tells Travis, "You know who lives there? A nigger lives there." I'm sure Tarantino would deny it, but I bet you anything that his tone-deaf cameo in Pulp Fiction is all about this nerdy young white filmmaker being obsessed with Scorsese, a celebrity director who's so bold that he puts himself onscreen playing a hateful racist. Tarantino wanted to be Scorsese so badly that he put himself in a lame version of that infamous cameo. It's embarassing. Whenever Pulp Fiction is on cable, when that scene comes up I want to crawl under my couch.

Another example of Tarantino's suspect judgment is his use of violence. Tarantino knows how to present violence in a spectacular way, but I don’t think he understands the weight of violence, the long-term ramifications of it, otherwise he wouldn’t make it so graphic and so lightweight at the same time. The savageness of it feels like an effect, like he’s trying to traumatize you just to demonstrate his power over you, not because he has any particular point to make. Everybody’s suffered real violence or knows someone who’s suffered real violence; I have to assume that Tarantino himself probably has some firsthand experience with it, or knows someone who does, because he’s a grown man who’s lived on this earth. But I don’t see evidence of that that his movies. The details of Tarantino's violence are realistic, sometimes pornographically so, but the context is not, and that makes Tarantino seem, to me, like a director who lacks a sense of proportion, and who’s striving for powerful effects he's not interested in earning.

Related to that is my sense that Tarantino's references and appropriations have no hierarchy. He seems to consider all things, all movies, to be equal. I think the failure to distinguish between the value, the depth, of things you’re appropriating opens a director to accusations that he's not serious. And again, to hit a note I feel I need to keep hitting here, I still don’t get a sense of what moves Tarantino and inspires him, of what he stands for. I have never seen him say, in a movie, “This is what I believe. This is what I prize. This is what matters to me.” He's a public figure, and he affects a "What you see is what you get" image, but he's very cagey about letting the audience look past The Quentin Tarantino Show and sense, in the movies, his true essence as a human being and as an artist.

Stanley Kubrick was often accused of being misanthropic and cold, and so was Robert Altman, but there were always points in their movies where you got an undeniable sense, no matter how artificial the filmmaking, of what they believed. Take Full Metal Jacket, for example. Pauline Kael complained that the end of that movie, the Hue sequence with the sniper, was a pulp revenge fantasy presented in a godlike way. But I don’t sense that at all. To me, that scene is the ultimate example of dehumanization and the cruelty that results from it. The Marines are seeing the young female sniper as a person after being shot at from a distance by her, then tracking her down and killing her, but they aren’t able to respond to that revelation as human beings because of how they’ve been desensitized. They stare down at her like she’s a land mine that they’ve just dismantled. It’s a cold movie, presented in a cold manner, but there’s anger and empathy and understanding in there. You sense a number of conflicted emotions in Kubrick – a grim amusement at the absurd behavior humans indulge in, and a sense of sadness at the potential that’s been snuffed out. I have yet to see a Tarantino film of similarly deep conviction and feeling.

KU: Your comments bring to mind the interview that closes out Manny Farber's book of criticism Negative Space, where Farber discusses John Milius' The Wind and the Lion:

"...in The Wind and the Lion, there's a key scene of Teddy Roosevelt [Brian Keith] sitting on the grass at a gunnery range, talking to his grandchildren. Obviously, Milius has a close feeling about Roosevelt; but why does he idolize him? Does that scene bring forth the idolatry? How much irony is involved? What does it have to do with the militarism issue, since it's a gun? Why is the golden autumn lighting so singularized, intense? Why is Keith faced away from the main flow of both story and character, in a didactic position relative to the camera? Why does the movie segue out at that moment? Is it making a statement about U.S. militarism or colonial ambitions -- and does Milius believe this implicitly? And if he believes Roosevelt stands for some order of the gun, or that the U.S. knew the right way and was trying to spread the gospel of democracy at its best around the world -- is that really what he believes? Or does he believe that it's a fault that inevitably leads to Vietnam? Or does he believe in the Zeitgeist of guns and gunmanship? ... I don't think it's important to ask Milius those questions; I think it's important for the spectator to want to know what he's seeing."

Clearly, Farber is not dismissing The Wind and the Lion in this passage. He is trying to engage with it on a variety of different levels, which I think is the aim of our conversation here. For me, with Tarantino and race, it's problematic in some instances and not in others. In Kill Bill it's not really an issue, because the world he creates is so false.

MZS: It's like the world the Coen brothers create in The Ladykillers.

KU: In terms of the Borges quote, it is willfully unreal. The unreality Kill Bill attains takes me beyond the questionable aspects, if I were to apply them to a real-world model. Likewise, in Jackie Brown, where Sam Jackson says "nigger" all the time. I believe his character would talk that way, so it doesn't bother me.

MZS: Right.

KU: He also has a very musical speaking rhythm, not just with that word, but with all of his dialogue in that movie, as he does in Pulp Fiction. Sam Jackson might be Tarantino's muse.

MZS: He might be, and he certainly embodies the kind of Stagger Lee, menacing Negro character in a way that no other modern actor does.

KU: Armond calls him "the walking mugshot." But then in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino casts himself in the "dead nigger storage" scene, and that is problematic. I think even in Kill Bill, the Japanese businessman that Go-Go Yubari kills is portrayed in a too-comical way, with rotten teeth and an overly cartoonish laugh. That takes me out of that particular movie, much in the way that a lot of people have a problem with Lucy Liu saying, "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids." But I'm able to accept it. It doesn't harm the whole for me. Maybe for other people it does -- it reveals to them the bankruptcy of the entire vision.

But I don't necessarily go to Tarantino for race commentary, because I don't think he has much to say about it. What I go to Tarantino for is a kind of old-school religion, a sense of fire and brimstone, with all the problems and beauties of that; an appreciation of movies, a sense of actors as people, an appreciation of the souls of performers. I appreciate his enthusiasm. Even though I might not see Uma Thurman herself as an ideal, I sense his enthusiasm for her. In his CSI episode, I may not particularly care for those main actors, except maybe William L. Petersen, but there are cameos by Tony Curtis and Frank Gorshin in it as well, as old-time gamblers; John Saxon shows up in half-light in most of the episode, but you still sense a very specific John Saxon-ness emanating from him, which is something only Tarantino can capture. He doesn't just pay tribute to certain movies and actors, he finds unseen facets, unseen sides.

MZS: That's an aspect of him that I do appreciate -- the sort of pop culture preservationist side of his talent.

My daughter is really into The Simpsons, which in a strange way I think has a sensibility that's closer to Tarantino's than that of any single filmmaker. There's a scene in this one episode where the Schwarzenegger muscleman character, Ranier Wolfcastle, appears on Springfield Squares, and they introduce him by having him talk about his latest film, which is about a businessman who goes to his old college where his son is now enrolled and is horrified to discover that his son has become a nerd. The host, the newscaster Kent Brockman, says, "That sounds very funny," and Wolfcastle says, "It's not a comedy." My daughter laughed at that, then she said, "Dad, why is that funny?" And I thought: Wow, now I've got to explain seven or eight different things to her. I've got to explain Hollywood Squares, the idea of Kent Brockman the newscaster doubling as a game show host, the whole subgenre of back-to-college movies and the obsession with nerds in the 1980s, and the entire career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, just for that one joke. The Simpsons is probably going to outlast all of the things it's making fun of, and in making fun of them, it's going to preserve their memory.

I wonder if Tarantino's movies aren't serving a similar function. He's like a one-man Smithsonian of schlock. The Kill Bill movies in particular are like a widescreen pop culture equivalent of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," a museum of 20th century genres. For a lot of college students studying English literature, their exposure to certain early and pre-20th century events, ideas and works of literature comes about because they had to read "The Waste Land" and research its footnotes, not because of initial exposure to that which inspired Eliot.

KU: Schlock on the surface -- but I would say these are more serious, more heady movies. I recall seeing Kill Bill, Volume 2 at a midnight screening. The audience was pretty much restless. There was one guy behind me who was narrating everything onscreen. He was bored with the longeurs, which weren't like Volume 1 at all. Again, that's sort of why I say it needs to be seen as a whole to get the full effect. The closest I've come to not liking Tarantino is after seeing Kill Bill, Volume 1, in its initial run. It wasn't until I saw Volume 2 that I thought, "Aha -- now what you've done makes sense to me." I enjoy him as much for his problems as for his insights. You talk about how you had to explain seven or eight different things to answer your daughter's question about that Simpsons joke. I feel like I've had to explain as many if not more things in this conversation, to justify my feelings about Tarantino. I agree with some of the criticisms of him, but ultimately that's absorbed by the passion, the feeling I get from each of the ends of his movies.

It's interesting to me that except for the anime sequence in Kill Bill, Volume 1, pretty much all the Tarantino scenes that you described as having moved you occur at the ends of his movies.

MZS: You're suggesting that perhaps there's a cumulative effect that's sinking in when I'm watching his movies, even when I'm rolling my eyes or looking at my watch?

KU: Yes. And I want to ask, "Mightn't that be enough?"

MZS: It very well might be. Every time I catch Pulp Fiction on cable, I watch a bit of it, and I discover new things that annoy me, and when it gets to the scene with Butch and the cabdriver--

KU: "What does it feel like to keeel a man?"

MZS: Awful. The first time I saw that scene at a press screening, I wanted to skip it and go for popcorn, and I still think that if he'd cut it, the movie would be five minutes shorter and no less entertaining. Yet when the movie's on cable, I'll sit through that scene again, and the scenes after that, all the while adding to my list of reasons why this isn't a great movie, and eventually there I am watching the closing credits. It's the Annie Hall joke again: The food is terrible, and such small portions._____________________
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8. Clarity and Insanity
MZS: Well...Grindhouse.

You have the advantage here, because you've seen it three times now, but I'm still eager to talk about it because we saw it over the weekend and I can't stop turning it over in my head. I'd like to talk about the whole thing for a minute if that's OK, because I feel like the double-feature aspect is important.

KU: Please begin.

MZS: Walter Chaw, who wrote the best review of Grindhouse that I've yet read, said Tarantino's feature was superior to Rodriguez's, and while I don't think Death Proof is perfect by any means, I agree with that, and I think the substance of Tarantino's movie becomes more apparent when it's juxtaposed against Planet Terror.

Rodriguez's movie struck me as mostly excessive and trashy -- in the true grindhouse spirit, I guess -- but there was something off about it. It was the fact that it was so overscaled and so glib and knowing at the same time. It had the budget of an A picture but the mentality of a B or B- picture, and at the same time, it also seemed to be parodying that sort of movie, which seems counterproductive because grindhouse movies generally know they're trash from the get-go. Tarantino's Death Proof, on the other hand, is really complicated, in ways both good and bad, and in the end I don't really feel he's trying to parody anything. He's just making a Tarantino movie, and as Chaw pointed out, if nothing else, this double feature proves that Tarantino is constitutionally incapable of making anything but a Quentin Tarantino movie.

KU: I liken it to the filmmakers being given a school assignment. It's telling that Rodriguez follows the assignment to the letter while Tarantino takes it and runs off in his own unique directions.

MZS: There were a few things that really struck me, in a good way, about Death Proof. One was the fact that, more than any other Tarantino movie, it indicates that there really is depth of feeling there, genuine human feeling, an affection for people. It occupies a similar place in his filmography that Casualties of War occupied in De Palma's, which is to say, while it certainly doesn't absolve him of charges that he likes to see women get hurt (as if he doesn't love to see men get hurt, too), it also establishes that he doesn't hate women -- far from it. I think he fears them and is in helpless awe of them.

KU: I think it's all those things and more. It's a complicated perspective, made all the more complicated to me by the structure of the piece. He sticks with two groups of women; Stuntman Mike is on the periphery. In the first, he's the pure villain, though Kurt Russell shows some underlying pain in that first part that comes out, full force, in the second part. I'm thinking particularly of when he's talking about all the shows he's worked on and no one knows what he's talking about. A wry Tarantino self-comment, but also an intuitive character moment.

Then in the second part Mike is more the focus of sympathy, though we don't know it until the car chase, which illustrates the shift in sympathies. I think it's telling, again, that Tarantino literally hangs out with the first group of girls and stands back from the second. His sympathies, his soul are more with the characters rooted in a single milieu -- Austin, a true artists' enclave. In this way, I feel Death Proof examines the differences between the rooted and the rootless. Ultimately it's the fellow travelers who are able to overcome Stuntman Mike.

MZS: I'm not with you on the shift in sympathies from the first part to the second. Stuntman Mike suffers in the second half, but I found his suffering mostly comical and pretty schematic, honestly -- a comment that isn't mean to take anything away from Russell's performance, which I think is extraordinary. I just mean that the whole "payback" thing in the second half feels pro forma to me. The movie's structure is intriguing -- in some ways it reminds me of Psycho, which starts out establishing a sympathetic female protagonist that you think is going to be your surrogate through the movie, then has a psychopathic murderer off her at roughly the halfway mark. Here we've got a whole carload of Janet Leighs, and an Anthony Perkins with broad shoulders, a killer smile and death-proof car who ultimately gets done in by some tough dames who are just as physically skilled and fearless as he is, ultimately more so.

But there's a problem here, for me, and it's that Tarantino established both sets of women as people, real people, so vividly that when they suddenly turned into standard babes-on-a-rampage, and the whole thing turned into a cartoon, it felt like a regression. I'm probably in the minority on this, but for me the single most extraordinary scene in that movie was the long take of Rosario Dawson and company in that restaurant shooting the shit. The choice of camera move -- the slowly rotating 360 degree tracking shot -- is an auteur's cliche that everyone from Arthur Penn to Brian De Palma to Woody Allen has used, and I kind of hoped I wouldn't see it again, but then Tarantino breathed new life into it, and really used it to observe these characters. I felt like I was sitting at that table. It was also the first time that I ever looked at Rosario Dawson and saw an idiosyncratic person there, as opposed to a beautiful camera subject. That life force you talked about earlier in our conversation really came through in how Tarantino photographed her -- in the energy he drew out of her.

KU: I know what you mean about Dawson, though my girl is Sydney Poitier's Jungle Julia. When she's twirling her hair in the bar to Smith's "Baby, it's You", I'm just in heaven. Now that said, I do think the character switcheroo you point out -- where the latter group of girls become "superheroines" -- is set up and prepared for. The way they make fun of the cheerleader girl (and how they leave her behind with the lecherous hillbilly) is particularly deplorable, but true to who I think these girls are: attractive empty shells, who we do, perversely, feel for. I chalk this up to their charisma, their way with QT's dialogue. I think the clincher in the switcheroo is Rosario Dawson's close-up where her face goes from fear to elation all of an instant. As I remarked in a comments thread, this rhymes with the final shot of Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" where she's riding off with her daughter. It treads a fine line between spiritualism and fetishism; clarity and insanity. It's all these things at once and we ask, I think, that question you say you yourself so often ask with Tarantino (and are kind of hurt by when someone asks it of Wes Anderson), "Is he serious?"

MZS: I think Tarantino's more serious than he's given credit for being, and perhaps more serious than he knows. I also think he's torn between being true to expectations of Tarantino and exploring aspects of his talent that are often thought of as something one just has to put up with in order to get to the "fun" stuff. That long take conversation is one such example. The first half of Death Proof was striking because of how it pushed toward stylization, but stayed in some kind of recognizable reality, geographic and emotional. Tarantino's movies are often set in a kind of fantastic everyday universe, like comic books that would be sold on the same shelf alongside Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb, and probably Frank Miller, too. But I felt he attained a degree of real-world weight in that first half, and in the quieter scenes in the second half, that I'd never seen him attempt before, except in parts of Jackie Brown, and I was intrigued by that.

For once, the Rohmer connection seemed to me more concrete than abstract. I found myself marveling at how Tarantino objectified, but also humbled himself before, the sheer physicality, the femininity, of his actresses. It's revealing that when Stuntman Mike makes his big play, he's kneeling. I thought Tarantino might actually be the right director for an adaptation of Tropic of Cancer. Something in his tone had that attitude, that very heterosexually male but at the same time lyrical and helplessly enthralled way of looking at women. Some of the shots -- particularly that slow track up Jungle Julia's raindrop-speckled leg on the porch -- had the granite sensuality of a Bob Dylan lyric. That stuff was so good, so daring for Tarantino, that the car chases and the final beatdown felt like QT giving the people what they want, and what the Ain't-It-Cool geek inside Tarantino always craves.

I think the boldest thing he could have done in order to really throw the entire grindhouse genre into sharp relief was to continue in the same vein he'd been exploring, and shock us with real anger, real pain, and shatter the same tropes he'd been setting up. But he couldn't bring himself to do that. I fear he loves trash too much to transform it utterly. It'd be like repudiating where he came from, the movies that made him who he is.

KU: And I believe there is real pain in that ending, which -- like Tsai Ming-liang does with a pornographic vernacular in The Wayward Cloud -- plays out as a grindhouse film on the surface while raising all sorts of troubling questions beneath. The villain is the victim; the first half resonates with the second half to complete the portrait. I don't doubt that Tarantino has a give-people-what-they-want mentality, but I also think he trusts his instincts to lead him, and realizes his subconscious will take him places contradictory to his public persona. I believe the work of art always betrays its creator. QT is no mere fanboy, but I don't know if he'd ever be able to express how deep and intuitive I think he is. Which maybe gives me a reason to exist.

MZS: Didn't it bother you that Tarantino had established very real characters with real emotions, then sent them on this crazy revenge mission that didn't jibe -- at least for me -- with what he'd established earlier? I didn't believe that women this real, this well-rounded, would be going after a homicidal maniac in such a cavalier, let's-get-him-girls kind of way. It was as if characters in a documentary suddenly decided, "From now on, we're going to act like stereotypical grindhouse babes."

The Zoë character, for instance, is utterly believable as a stuntwoman who seeks danger for a living and because she loves it, but the context for that behavior is clear; she tests herself within her own limits. I didn't believe that she'd endanger herself in that way and turn into a super-avenger on a dime. She had too much at stake, and there were too many imponderables. This plays into the Borges quote about unreality. I thought the world Tarantino created was so much more real that what you usually see in a grindhouse movie -- except maybe one directed by Monte Hellman, who was more arthouse at heart anyway -- that when it became unreal, I didn't believe it.

KU: And I did, because I believe that switch was entirely prepared for. To come back to your Psycho parallel I think the first group of girls are Janet Leigh, the second group Vera Miles and John Gavin. Like Hitchcock, Tarantino subtly shifts our sympathies until we identify more with the monster than with the "heroes." I find his rhyming structure (sticking with the girls in both sections) to be quite audacious. And while the ending plays triumphant, I think it's actually calculated to create some underlying disturbance, sort of like De Palma's end to The Fury, which I read as tragic, even as I'm cheering John Cassavetes getting blown sky-high.

It comes back again to what I'm saying about the rooted vs. the rootless. The second group of girls are Hollywood types, jumping between places, really no sense of the world even though they've traveled it (I'd say this is, in part, a sly QT rebuke to his critics). Tarantino is more interested in the Austin girls (as am I, quite honestly) because they are rooted, not just in a place, but in a genuine artistic pursuit. The telling line for me is when Jungle Julia says that she and her friends are not really fighting. She admits to the mask that she puts on in public. I love the moment when she's talking to the pot dealer on the phone, asks "Where are you?!!" in ultimate high bitch mode. The record player comes on. She moves alone to a back room and then softens..."Where are you?" Then the text message aside (scored to the love theme from Blow Out), which just kills me, I love it so. And the way Julia holds Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) at the end of the night, apologizing to her for the whole lapdance situation. There's genuine feeling between them, where I think the second group of girls are always superficial, make bad choices (as Chaw says in his review), and it's only when Stuntman Mike shows up that we realize why the disparity. The second part is about him -- monster by night, all-too-human by day.

MZS: Here's where I haul out an accusation that's often leveled at me -- the movie you're describing is much greater than the movie I saw. There was so much potential in Death Proof, much of it realized and much more unrealized -- that it reminded me of another Pauline Kael quote, from her review of The Wild Bunch. She said that in that film, Peckinpah doesn't just pour new wine into an old bottle, he explodes the bottle. I wanted Tarantino to explode the bottle here, and though there were glimmers of intent, I didn't think he followed through on them, because he was so damned fond of the bottle.

I didn't sense any undertone of unease in that final shot. To me it seemed a triumphant freeze-frame that sent people out of the theater happy that the monster had been slain. That's true to the emotions of the genre Tarantino is honoring, but I don't think it's a tradition that should be honored. I had much the same problem with Rodriguez' Sin City, which I thought was one third of a great movie -- the third with Mickey Rourke. The subtext of that entire film, which a lot of finger-wagging critics who presumably have never actually read Frank Miller on the page didn't get, is that the hypermasculinity, the need for revenge, that's depicted in all of those stories, particularly in the Rourke story, isn't being taken at face value, it's being pushed to extremes so that it can be parodied. There's a heart of darkness in that story that makes the other, similar stories in Sin City feel redundant and reflexive, just an acolyte mistakenly believing he's honoring a master by replicating his superficial aspects.

I felt a similar frustration with Tarantino in the second half of Death Proof. The truly audacious thing to do here would have been to hurt the audience, really hurt them, and leave no doubt that the ritualized revenge enacted in that final segment is symptomatic of the worst tendencies in the human race, or at least the dumber tendencies of schlock culture. Cartoonish male notions of payback have been transposed onto women who've been drawn so realistically that the behavior makes even less sense, and feels like even more of a headscratcher, than it would seem if Tarantino had made all the women dunderheaded cardboard cutouts from frame one.

KU: To each his own. I felt the unease in the final frame, and it was only accentuated by Dawson's drop-kick to the face, which is like a bloody punctuation mark...a perfect endpoint. Even though the ending is played triumphantly, I do not read it as that. But it's not evasiveness of the dark side of human nature I sense so much as contradiction writ large. You know I'm big on contradiction. To feel, to see, to sense, to live the antitheses. I have a bloodlust in me that I want to be satiated... I've said before I'm all for a sanguine cinema: taken to the honest extremes, I see something spiritual and sexual in it. That's what I get from Death Proof, from De Palma's Fury, from Spielberg's Munich, from Cronenberg's The Fly. All very different films from very different directors -- blood coursing violently through their veins.

What connects them is the sense I feel that each director is being true to his view of the world. That's what I ask of an artist, and I feel Tarantino (for all his problematic aspects, which we've touched on in other areas of this discussion) is always true to himself. I enjoy the challenges of being in his head. Death Proof only confirms his greatness for me.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger. Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door, a staff critic for Slant Magazine, and a contributor to a variety of print and online publications.