By Kenji Fujishima
[Editor's Note: This is the first of four installments to be published on consecutive days (Tuesday-Friday). The essay will be available in full on an adjunct site the day after publication of the final installment.]
Introduction
When Pulp Fiction hit the movie landscape like a tornado in 1994---the film surprised almost everyone by picking up a Palme d’Or at Cannes that year---it wasn’t only moviegoers lapping up writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s irresistible circular triptych of blood, guts, bullets and gleeful postmodern hip. Critics, by and large, bought into the hype for it too. When he reviewed it for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called Tarantino “the Jerry Lee Lewis of cinema, a pounding performer who doesn’t care if he tears up the piano, as long as everybody is rocking.” Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it “quite simply, the most exhilarating piece of filmmaking to come along in the nearly five years I’ve been writing for this magazine.”
However, the most interesting critical reaction that came out of the Pulp Fiction bubble -- at least, the thing that caught my eye the most -- was voiced by David Denby, who wrote for New York magazine at the time. In his review of the film, Denby compared Tarantino not to Jerry Lee Lewis, but to the famous 1960s French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard. According to Denby:"Pulp Fiction is play, a commentary on old movies. Tarantino works with trash, and by analyzing, criticizing, and formalizing it, he emerges with something new, just as Godard made a lyrical work of art in Breathless out of his memories of casually crappy American B-movies. Of course Godard was, and is, a Swiss-Parisian intellectual, and the tonalities of his work are drier, more cerebral. Pulp Fiction, by contrast, displays an entertainer’s talent for luridness."
As a recent convert to the Jean-Luc Godard bandwagon myself, I admit that my initial reaction was to take Denby’s and others' critical declarations of this sort as proof of Tarantino’s inferiority to Godard as an artist. Sure, both directors share a lot of surface similarities: they both have certain stylistic likenesses, and they both dabble in the postmodern genre of self-reflexivity -- making movies that make you aware that you are watching a movie, to put it simply. But the differences are more telling: Godard, the cinema philosopher who likes to use popular American movie genres for his own intellectual and socially critical ends, seems to have totally different artistic priorities from Tarantino, the self-professed trash movie geek who often seems more interested in having fun with those same popular genres than in rigorously exploring anything political, semiotic or philosophical except in the most movie-based terms. A close look at Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction versus, say, Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) and one could perhaps detect a sense of real world melancholy underlying the surface playfulness of Godard’s little heist picture that is hardly present amidst the unabashed pop trashiness of Pulp Fiction.
But then I got to wondering: could it just be that Tarantino and Godard are essentially the same filmmaker, except part of different time periods and totally different societies? Certainly, there are quite a number of noticeable differences between the France of the politically tumultuous 1960s -- when Godard was making his mark on world art cinema -- and the media-saturated, relatively more politically apathetic America of the 1990s, during which Tarantino first burst onto the scene with Reservoir Dogs (1992). Perhaps those who try to make a case for the artistic superiority of one director over another are, at least for the moment, forgetting that both directors come from such diverse backgrounds, and that all films speak of the contexts in which they are made and seen. Films, as do all works of art, do not exist in a vacuum, and to treat them as entities separate from time and space is to engage in only a superficial level of interpretation, at best.
I think that this is an important distinction to make, especially when it brings into clearer focus the fact that both directors, to admittedly varying degrees, are working in basically the same tradition of the self-reflexive work of art, a tradition that goes all the way back to Cervantes and even Shakespeare -- with its self-consciousness and its implicit allegory of readership -- and maybe beyond. So while Godard is always aware of the social function of the cinematic image, Tarantino turns self-reflexivity into a form of genre pastiche. Does that automatically make one director’s work more important than the other? Godard fans might prefer his social analysis and critique to the self-absorbed playfulness of Tarantino, but what explains Tarantino’s immense popularity all over the world on the basis of Pulp Fiction or his recent two-part trash epic Kill Bill (2003, 2004)? Godard, by comparison, may command only an intense cult following outside France at best, particularly now that he has remained fairly reclusive over the past couple of decades. One would certainly not see recent Godard works like In Praise of Love (2001) or Notre Musique (2004) headlining the marquees of big multiplexes nationwide.
Thus, in this weeklong series -- and in celebration of both Film Forum's revival of Godard's La Chinoise starting Wednesday and the recent DVD release of Tarantino's Death Proof -- I would like to examine the similarities and differences between Godard and Tarantino in many of their different facets. I plan to explore this comparison not only by examining their respective work and comparing and contrasting them, but also by considering both directors in terms of both their personal biographies and objective historical contexts. I will then draw on all this to evaluate how both directors are similar yet temperamentally and substantively different, and how each is representative of his particular era and social environment. As for their body of work: because Godard has been so prolific for over four decades now, it would simply be unwieldy to try to encompass his entire body of work (a lot of which isn’t even readily available on video). For that reason, I will focus almost entirely on the bulk of his groundbreaking oeuvre from the 1960s -- his most popular period, arguably, and the one most comparable to Tarantino’s -- when comparing it to Tarantino’s comparably meager, yet equally varied and fascinating output.
Ultimately, the broad question I would like to pose is: is Tarantino really a Jean-Luc Godard of the 1990s and today? Maybe there is something to the comparison after all, and not just technically or stylistically speaking. If Godard is a reflection of a politically-conflicted, self-aware, industrializing society, Tarantino is perhaps an example of Godard’s convictions taken to a perversely logical conclusion. In a society that has already been industrialized and invaded by pop culture as America has, maybe it is only logical that a Tarantino would take that self-awareness and popularize it for the mass American audience -- an audience, some might say, that prefers its entertainment to be pure escapism, something that Tarantino provides even as he occasionally makes gestures toward something deeper. And what of Tarantino’s worldwide popular success compared to Godard’s relatively provincial success? What does that suggest about the societies and audiences from which both filmmakers came? And, if they are so different, does that necessarily mean that they are both incomparable? Or could it just mean that Tarantino is a kind of Godard stripped of political content (and perhaps creating an implicit stance of its own: apathy) and raised on a diet of both high art and pop culture?
Self-Consciousness
At one point in Band of Outsiders, all three main characters -- Franz (Sami Frey), Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Odile (Anna Karina) -- impulsively decide to share a minute of silence amongst one another because, as Franz says, they don’t have anything left to say to each other at that particular point. When they do initiate their minute of silence, however, Godard suddenly silences the soundtrack as well -- almost as if Godard wants you to feel in your gut just how long a minute of silence can really be.
In Pulp Fiction, when Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) responds to Vincent Vega’s (John Travolta) befuddlement (“What the fuck is this place?”) after they both get to Jackrabbit Slim’s, Mia coaxes him by saying “Don’t be a…” and then drawing a rectangle in the air to visually denote “square.” But when she draws that rectangle, Tarantino visually emphasizes it so that she seems to be drawing an actual physical rectangle -- one made up of tiny brightly-lit bulbs -- onscreen.
Both of these moments have the effect of breaking the fourth wall, of deliberately throwing us out of the movie for that one brief period of time -- in effect, to remind us that what we are watching is a movie. In other words, those two examples evince self-consciousness about their artistic selves that courses through not only both films, but also through both directors’ bodies of work as a whole. Furthermore, it is this tradition of self-consciousness in which both Godard and Tarantino consistently work -- it is, in a broad sense, what is so strikingly similar about both directors.
First things first: what makes up a “self-conscious” work of art? A self-conscious work of art signifies a work that consistently makes the audience aware of its sheer movie-ness (to put it in fairly crude terms). Many fiction films demand that audience members assent to the illusion that the filmmakers -- the director, the actors, the behind-the-scenes crews -- are presenting to us. For that reason, classical Hollywood films are known for their unobtrusive style: invisible editing, carefully-structured plotting, and well-placed camerawork, among other attributes. Better to use cinematic materials to tell the story well rather than experiment too much and risk impairing our willing suspension of disbelief.
Self-conscious artists, however, are less interested in immersing their audience in their films’ illusions than in exposing the gears underlying those illusions, in making us aware of how fake those illusions actually are. Look, self-conscious filmmakers seem to say to their audience, I could tell this story in the familiar classical manner. I could make more of an effort to immerse you in the lives of these characters and the world they inhabit. But that would only be false to reality, because classically-told stories simply aren’t real, as much as we might want to believe they are. As Robert Stam puts it:"In their freedom and creativity, anti-illusionistic artists imitate the freedom and creativity of the gods. Like gods at play, reflexive artists see themselves as unbound by life as it is perceived (Reality), by stories as they have been told (Genre), or by a nebulous probability (Verisimilitude). ... The god of anti-illusionist art is not an immanent pantheistic deity but an Olympian, making noisy intrusion into fictive events. We are torn away from the events and the characters and made aware of the pen, or brush, or camera that has created them."
If art is all about raising our consciousness of the world around us, of looking at certain previously-taken-for-granted things anew, self-conscious works of art use, as their playing field, previous works of art instead of something from the outside world. Self-conscious artists take apart what has already been done before, try to understand what previous artists were trying to do with those elements and how they went about doing it, and put all those elements back together again to create something new.
Stam notes that this approach has roots all the way back to Shakespeare; he cites the use of the play-within-a-play in Hamlet as an early example of self-reflexivity even before Cervantes picked it up and pushed it further in Don Quixote. Only relatively recently, however, has this kind of approach been taken seriously as an artistic style in the cinema.
Both Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Luc Godard fit right into this mold of the postmodern self-conscious artist. Their works deliberately take you out of your involvement in the film’s story and point up the artificiality of the construct. Though their purposes for doing so may be different (as we will see later on), their means are often surprisingly similar.
Reworking classical narrative
Neither Godard nor Tarantino show much interest in telling stories in any conventional sense. Indeed, Godard -- in films like Masculin féminin (1966), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) and Weekend (1968) -- barely shows any interest in telling any kind of story at all, instead preferring to essentially make either portrait films (his fascinated-yet-critical look at French youth and the sexual divide in 1960s France in Masculin féminin, for instance) or essay films (his seemingly stream-of-consciousness philosophical ruminations on the power of the image in an increasingly industrialized Paris that form the backbone of Two or Three Things). Godard’s deliberate disregard for classical narrative convention goes all the way down to the level of technique, most notably editing (his celebrated use of jump cuts and mismatched shots from Breathless (1960) on) and sound (his playful experiments with music and sound in A Woman is a Woman (1961) or his random dropping-out of sound at certain points in Band of Outsiders and Masculin féminin).
On the other hand, Tarantino often sticks to a fairly unobtrusive technical style. Much like Godard, he is an actor’s director, sometimes preferring long takes to allow his actors to strut their stuff, other times cutting back and forth between actors who are conversing with each other. Tarantino’s innovations of narrative are temporal rather than technical. Pulp Fiction is known for its circular, three-story plot structure, in which the film starts and ends in the same setting; in which a threatening incident in an apartment cuts away in media res only to resume in the third story; and in which a major character killed off in the second story returns very much alive in the third story, which had taken place beforehand. Reservoir Dogs and the Kill Bill films all play with this kind of non-chronological storytelling -- the former in particular cuts back and forth between past and present in dissecting how a robbery attempt went horribly wrong. Even Tarantino’s most linear film, Jackie Brown (1997), has one show-stopping sequence -- a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s early heist thriller The Killing (1956) -- that replays a theft from three different points of view. And his most recent film, Death Proof (2007), still manages a measure of structural rigor even while remaining linear all the way through: it’s a two-part work, with rhyming motifs giving it an underlying sense of unity.
The point here is that neither director makes films that fall neatly into typical Hollywood storytelling structures, even though both directors unapologetically dabble in well-worn Hollywood genres. This has the effect of taking a viewer out of his/her Hollywood-induced comfort zone as far as storytelling is concerned.
References
The films of both Godard and Tarantino are often layered -- or littered, depending on whom you ask -- with references: to pop culture, politics, other films, popular music, literature, etc. Take Godard’s crime films, like Breathless and Band of Outsiders: they are full of references to both literature (the Dolores Hitchens novel that Godard credits as the inspiration for Band of Outsiders is referenced visually and verbally in the film; one of the characters is named Arthur Rimbaud) and cinema (the poster of Humphrey Bogart that seemingly stares at Michel in Breathless; the use of legendary filmmaker Fritz Lang playing himself in the film-about-filmmaking Contempt (1963); the paraphrasing of narration from Fritz Lang’s 1950 thriller House by the River to alert “latecomers” to the theater at one point in Band of Outsiders); later films such as Pierrot le fou, Masculin féminin and Weekend would also add explicit and implicit allusions to the contentious political events of the day -- Vietnam in particular -- to his burgeoning plate of references. (But then, even the relatively lightweight Band of Outsiders finds Godard in a serious-enough mood to make a random yet poignant reference to Rwandan atrocities as Franz is reading the newspaper out loud at one moment.)
Tarantino tends to limit his references simply to cinematic ones -- movies were the biggest part of his upbringing after all, as we shall see later -- but Roger Ebert does note one interesting literary allusion: “the opening exchange between Jules and Vincent about what the French call Quarter-Pounders, for example, is a reminder of the conversation between Jim and Huckleberry Finn about why the French don’t speak English.” As he does with movies, Tarantino is taking a literary trope from a classic American novel and updating it on film for a newer audience. Also interesting to note are Tarantino’s references to Godard himself. In the unrated version of Death Proof, for instance, one lengthy sequence that kicks off the film’s second half is shown in black-and-white until the film suddenly reverts back to color, in a piece of technique that may remind some viewers of Godard’s switching of color filters in an opening sequence of Contempt. Or consider the twist sequence in Pulp Fiction, which recalls the Madison dance sequence of Band of Outsiders in its randomness and sense of isolation. Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction is also done up like Anna Karina in My Life to Live (1962), short black hair and all, even if Mia Wallace comes off more like a gangster’s wife playacting at being a gun moll than Karina’s Nana ever does throughout Godard’s film. (In some cases with Tarantino’s references, context matters less than the fact that he makes the reference in the first place.)
But such references often aren’t simply mere mentions or hints of that sort. Often, Godard and Tarantino run deeper, trying to allude to whole genres or styles with their references. Godard’s voiceover narration of Band of Outsiders is full of comparisons: when Arthur decides to delay the robbery, Godard says that such an act is “in keeping with the tradition of bad B movies”; when Franz decides to turn around to try to save his friend, he’s compared to “the hero of a legendary romance.” (Ironic, because Band of Outsiders, though it may seem like a similar kind of bad B movie or legendary romance when you hear a plot description, certainly doesn’t play like either; if anything, it is a romantically anti-heroic film that often alludes to a heroic tradition.) Even his characters diegetically evoke such movie-conscious associations: Arthur thinks of Franz as “a good shield…like in the movies”; one random character asks his teacher how to translate “a big million-dollar film” to English.
Tarantino does something similar -- taking recognized genre characteristics and putting them into entirely new situations -- except his references simply stay on the level of iconography. Thus, Pulp Fiction doesn’t so much impose genre conventions onto grounded characters as basically conceive characters as icons from the start and then fashion them in a manner that feels more pop-contemporary and wink-wink existential than such characters usually are in classic noir genre pictures. Unlike Franz and Arthur in Band of Outsiders, Jules and Vincent aren’t regular folks who try to be glamorous movie hit men. They are glamorous movie hit men through and through -- their black-and-white suit-and-tie wardrobe recalls any number of Jean-Pierre Melville’s quietly existential heroes from 1960s noirs like Le Samourai. It’s just that they talk like stoned pop philosophers when they discuss the minutiae of daily life in ways that make such minutiae seem more significant than they really are. Many of Melville’s heroes, by contrast, spoke barely a word. Then there is troubled boxer Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), who seems to have walked right out of the 1949 real-time boxing noir The Set-Up, especially since the character is saddled with a plot that recalls similar situations in Robert Wise’s film. And when Butch feels compelled to save an angry Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) from sex-crazed male hicks, the various weapons he examines, before deciding upon a samurai sword as his weapon of choice, implicitly act as representations of the kinds of trash genres -- action, horror, martial arts -- that obsess Tarantino himself.
Yet, as different as their approaches may be, Godard and Tarantino are essentially playing the same game: making films that are heavily intertextual, depending to a certain extent on their -- and our -- knowledge of other works outside of the one we are currently watching. In a way, they are creating both a cinematic meta-context and a community of viewers who get that context.
Choice of genres
Godard and Tarantino’s references to “lower” genres which I referred to above is also a characteristic of postmodernism, and is thus important to articulate here for the purposes to establishing the tradition out of which both directors create in the cinema.
In his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson believes that one of the tenets of postmodernism is the blurring of the lines between high culture and pop culture. As he explains it:"…[M]any of the newer postmodernisms have been fascinated by that whole landscape of advertising and motels, of the Las Vegas strip, of the late show and Grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and the science fiction or fantasy novel. They no longer “quote” such “texts” as a Joyce might have done, or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw."
This would seem especially appropriate to Tarantino, whose films are almost entirely about his mixing of “texts”; Pulp Fiction, after all, references and borrows from a whole host of films and genres (principally noir films like the aforementioned The Set-Up, but also such diverse sources as Saturday morning cartoons, Saturday Night Fever, even 1960s Godard films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders). Even Jackie Brown, arguably Tarantino’s most “down-to-earth” feature, constructs its universe out of remnants of 1970s blaxpoitation flicks (with its star, Pam Grier, its most obvious icon). But keep in mind that Jameson published his article a decade before the Tarantino cult exploded. Godard did this kind of wholesale rummaging of pop culture in many of his ’60s features before Tarantino picked up on it for his films. While many of his ’60s films deconstruct popular American genres -- Breathless, Band of Outsiders (crime drama), A Woman is a Woman (musical comedy), Contempt (Hollywood melodrama), Alphaville (1965, science fiction), Made in U.S.A. (1966, spy thriller), Pierrot le fou (as many genres as possible) -- they also exude the kind of fascination with “low” culture that Jameson is talking about. Appropriate, then, that some early-’60s Godard works like Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou are based on supposedly inferior literary material -- a cheap American thriller entitled Fool’s Gold in the case of the former, a Lolita knockoff called Obsession in the case of the latter. Even when Godard credits or quotes “high” literary, artistic or philosophical sources in film -- Pierrot le fou, for example, is loaded with such allusions, from Diego Velázquez to James Joyce -- Godard places them in a distinctly modern context that doesn’t immediately call to mind something that one might initially consider “high” art.
Because both Godard and Tarantino dabble so unreservedly in “lower” genres, and take such an interest in popular culture, many who simply look at the playful surfaces of Band of Outsiders or Pulp Fiction have sometimes perceived the films of both directors as trivial and “fun” at best. As much as they might prefer to play around with the archetypes of crime drama or the musical or whatever, when you see such clichés in their films, they certainly don’t play and feel like any of their sources. Such deconstructions of genre, in addition to embracing a measure of romanticism toward the movie-influenced characters that they sometimes simultaneously debunk, is what intrigues me the most about their work. It is a vivid illustration of the “increasing difficulty” of drawing the line between high and popular art as anything that Jameson points out in his essay.
When it comes to both directors’ self-reflexivity, I think the most important similarity to note is that, because of the distance they instill between the viewer and what is happening onscreen, in their films one often ends up caring less about the ostensible plots and more about other things -- for instance, the artificial, movie-based nature of it all. It is almost as if Godard and Tarantino assume that you are quite familiar with all the conventions of the genres in which they work, that you’ve basically seen it all before, and that there is nothing more to do with genre clichés except to try to mock them or think of them in a new way.
Of course, this begs the question: why are Godard and Tarantino playing this self-reflexive game in the first place?
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Kenji Fujishima is a contributor to The House Next Door, a Rutgers University journalism student and the publisher of My Life at 24 Frames Per Second.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
The Philosopher and the Fan: Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino -- 1st Installment
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25 comments:
An interesting article. But ultimately, I think the differences between the two far outweigh the similarities (which are more superficial than a superficial glance might reveal).
The biggest difference, to my mind, is their approach to narrative. While QT might jump around in time, he never actually attacks narrative in any way. On the contrary, his stories always wrap up very neatly once the pieces are put together, and the nonlinear structure serves only to make them more exciting, not to undermine them (as demonstrated by how easily Tarantino structure was spread through film and TV that came after).
This may be part of the difference you rightly identify between them---that Godard's a thinker and QT is an entertainer. But then, Godard can be quite entertaining (even his most turgid films are visually ravishing), while QT seems to have never had a thought in his head.
That's why QT's approach never really comes off as a "deconstruction". Godard is constantly deconstructing film grammer and presentation in order to reveal structures of power and history behind it. QT's consciousness as a filmmaker exists in a hermetic world with no relation to anything in three dimensions, so he can't deconstruct film---there's nothing to reveal. That's why he always falls back on the dependable warhorse of story, content to nibble around the edges rather than actually undermine the foundations. If Godard is carrying out a revolutionary strike at the castle of cinema, QT is a court jester, grinning at its foibles while careful never to actually undermine its authority.
And as for why he's more popular, well, there's your answer. Nothing in a QT film will ever confuse the viewer, much less question their relationship to what their watching; the techniques displayed only serve to encase the viewer in a protective cocoon of "it's only a movie", so the one way that traditional narrative film could shake up the viewer---forcing them to think about something in their life in a new way---is taken away, since the film is carefully constructed not to evoke thoughts of anything outside itself.
I have to agree with that fuzzy bastard. Watching a QT movie is the equivalent of someone showing you their meticulously catalogued record collection; here's this one, and here's that one, and, ooh, here's a real collector's item. Godard, whether or not you agree with him, was at least trying to say something, while QT's approach is close to that of a very functional autistic teenager, who, in small doses, can be very entertaining. QT is a product of our culture, a symptom. Godard was a product of his culture too, but he seemed to not care for his culture and wanted to make some corrections. QT has no beef with anything. He is the Arch Consumer, only interested in acquiring things. As a matter of fact, I can't think of a filmmaker less political or concerned with the state of the world than Quentin Tarantino. All I know about QT is that he has seen a lot of movies and that he fetishizes black culture, and the he loves feet. Other than that, he's a blank. I don't think anyone could ever accuse Godard of being a blank. The reason QT was so popular is that he represented a very particular type that reached it's apex in the early 90's. His last two movies have been so disconnected from what is going on in the world that I feel as if his champions are pulling muscles in order to maintain his artistic cred. Death Proof was totally hollow, a pastiche of himself. The dialogue sounded as if it was written by one of the countless QT imitators, Vintage '97. The problem with QT is that he has never had anything to say, and as the years wear on, that is becoming all the more apparent. I'm glad he loves the movies, and I'm glad he's seen every single movie ever, but what's in it for me?
This is a hell of a can of worms to open, Kenji, because the implicit unifying premise here is that for better or worse, moviegoing eras, like democracies, tend to get the representation they deserve.
You're probably correct to say that Tarantino is the Godard of the modern era, and that his hermetically sealed (as That Fuzzy Bastard puts it) style befits a culture that has become fragmented and increasingly narcissistic and trivial in its concerns. Pop culture, not politics or religion or even physical community, is the glue that binds us all together, and that's a troublesome thing to consider. To an extent, movies have always been self-referential, borrowing and stealing from what came before and repurposing it; but as Ebert inadvertently points out by likening the "Royale with cheese" conversation to a bit from "Huckleberry Finn," Tarantino (indeed most high-profile filmmakers) don't mix together references from cinema, painting, philosophy, stage drama, poetry, etc.; by and large they just reference movies and TV shows. And as the generations turn over, and moviegoers bred on movie and TV-saturated pop culture make their own films and TV shows, the echo chamber effect is likely to become even more pronounced.
The most troublesome (in a good way) aspect of your approach is that it's rather scientific in its diagnosis of who QT and Godard are, and what they represent in context of their time and place. You're not condemning Tarantino as an innately inferior or trivial filmmaker so much as saying that he reflects the interests and temperament of his time, as all artists do. That we haven't seen the rise to prominence of another filmmaker as politically engaged and intellectually wide-ranging as Godard doesn't necessarily indicate that there are no such filmmakers working today, but rather, that the marketplace (and audiences) don't have much use for them and would not elevate them to QT-level popularity.
To lament that fact is to lament something far larger than the popularity of one particular (admittedly fascinating) filmmaker, Tarantino.
How popular was Godard in his day compared to Tarantino now? That's a trick question; it's apples and oranges. Godard was one of the go-to subjects among cinephiles during the first decade of his career, but awareness of (and debate about) his work didn't penetrate the general consciousness in the same way that Tarantino has managed to do. Is that a reflection of Tarantino's relatively undemanding, reassuring methods and preference for neatly rounded stories? Or does it have more to do with QT's outrageous sense of humor, his seductive use of violence and pop music, and the fact that his rise coincided with the rise of the home video-schooled cinephile?
I agree with TFB that Tarantino's mainly concerned with being an entertainer, whereas Godard wished, for a while at least, to be perceived both an entertainer and an artist/philosopher. Except for Oliver Stone -- who's pretty much been hounded of the stage since his great "Nixon" and treated mainly as a sensationalist crank -- there has been no American filmmaker of towering significance who adopted that Godardian persona (celebrity/unseen author, entertainer/philosopher/artist, provocateur/showman, etc.). Stone's "Alexander," which was unfairly maligned, I think -- too many reviews fixated on Colin Farrell's wig and Angelina Jolie's accent rather than the substance of the movie -- had a Godardian interest in the construction of myth. It drove that point home through the repeated invocations of myth, song and iconic painting, and the framing device with Anthony Hopkins' narrator, Ptolemy, whose pronouncements told you that you weren't seeing the "real" Alexander, but the Alexander that Ptolemy wished to preserve in the minds of his students. Godard's "Notre Musique," which hit theaters around the same time, covered so much of the same ground that the two movies could have been packaged in a double-bill. But would anyone have gone to see it?
One other thing that jumped out at me was this quote about the self-consciously intrusive storyteller: "The god of anti-illusionist art is not an immanent pantheistic deity but an Olympian, making noisy intrusion into fictive events. We are torn away from the events and the characters and made aware of the pen, or brush, or camera that has created them." This to me illustrates one of the basic differences between Godard and Tarantino, a difference that goes deeper than style or temperament. Godard and QT both play God behind the camera, but where Godard is often sincerely interested in what it means to be God, QT often seems to dig the Old Testament power trip of it all -- the ability to take a character's life in an horrific way and to make the audience squirm. If QT is a director-as-God, he's like one of those creatures on the old "Star Trek" who tormented the crew of the Enterprise with his omnipotent shenanigans, then was ultimately revealed to be a little boy with a mean streak.
I can tell I'm going to be obsessing over this piece today, so I'll probably check in again later with more ramblings, some of which may revise or recant comments made above.
Cheers!
This is probably a good moment to direct our readers to the conversation Matt and I had about Tarantino a few months back. Click here.
As for my own thoughts -- beyond a hearty "Great job, Kenji!" -- I'll leave them to my long-gestating essay on Death Proof, which I anticipate to be coming soon.
The distinctions between Tarantino and Godard are summed up very well by Matt's post when it comes to historical context and the thematic/narrative content of their films. But we must not forget about form/style/medium in this discussion, which I think was Kenji's original point in comparing these seemingly disparate filmmakers. What Tarantino is interested in, much like Godard (from what I've read and seen having only watched one of his films) is a deeply reflexive project about the "skin" of film, the surface of a cinematic universe and the pure visceral impact of perceiving a moving image within a narrative context. From that standpoint, an argument can definitely be made as to their aesthetic similarities.
Funny you mention that, Keith. I was just about to post a brief thought (and link) to that very article, but you beat me to it. I will also look forward to your piece on Death Proof. Most of the criticism I've read of it has been surprisingly shallow, and for as much banter exists out there about Tarantino and his work, much of it seems misdirected to me. I will be writing about the film as well in a piece I'm writing for 24 Lies a Second right now. I probably won't be done that for at least a few weeks though.
Can't make any lengthy comments here right now, b/c I'm rattling this off quickly (and covertly) during work. To my mind, there's very little I can say right now that'll dispute much of the comments made above. One of the main reasons why I mostly focused on Godard's 1960s films in my essay is because much of it shows his directorial obsessions in a relatively more entertaining and accessible style than became the case with his later work. So I felt that it'd be more fitting to compare that particularly body of work (from Breathless to Weekend, roughly) to Tarantino's body of work to date. Even then, though, the similarities and differences are easily apparent...and, apparently, somewhat troubling, if Matt's comment is any indication.
Only thing I'll disagree with, then, is anonymous's assessment of Death Proof as "totally hollow." I think it's actually one of QT's most disturbing films, and, I daresay, the closest he's come to approximating Godardian deconstruction, while still remaining his fanboy self through and through. (Whether he intended it to be as such or not...) Anyway, perhaps I'll expound more on that later (because I didn't get much of a chance to do that much with it in this essay); gotta get back to work...
Ted, you very interestingly quote in your first comment about the "skin" of film (I am assuming that was far less than an accident) and that the only real basis of comparison between Godard and QT is the aesthetics of their work. Interesting because Godard is often quoted as saying that cinematic style (skin) and content (insides) truly cannot be divorced; perhaps ironic because Godard and QT really can be compared in no other way. Kenji, I truly look forward to the remainder or your essay, and especially to the "can of worms" you have opened and flung all over the room.
Chet,
I would hold that this binary supposition, often refered to an any number of pairings -- Style/Substance, Form/Content, Medium/Message -- is false for the very reason that Godard theorized. I wrote about this back in April in post entitled Thinking In Dualities: Media, Social Space, and Cinema. Nevertheless, while such binaries may be false, they are still very real insofar that they are constitutive of our perceptual schema for interpreting the moving image. Even our attempts to understand the "form" or "style" of something are often done so from a very "content"-based understanding of cinematic style, which is why so many film classes fail miserably. They presuppose the validity of many Grand Theories and then situate their limited knowledge of cinematic style in relation to that. That is not to say that critical analyses should function outside this dualistic paradigm, but rather that the focus shift to other end of the spectrum, i.e. the form/medium.
I hold that practices of criticism and filmmaking require a massive paradigmatic shift. Filmmakers and critics need to enact that shift in their attempts to understand the processes by which we perceive and comprehend moving images. We wouldn't necessarily abandon Grand Theory, but if this shift takes place, we can understand how the specific elements of moving images work within and outside the frameworks of such theories, and necessarily confound (and uphold ) them.
McLuhan says it best: the medium is the message. In this statement, he both acknowledges and collapses the binary. I think we can only collapse it by moving away from traditional understanding of it and think about how form constitutes content. In many ways, Tarantino's films do this.
I've heard ALEXANDER called many things, but never "Godardian." I think I can handle that, as long as nobody starts calling NATURAL BORN KILLERS "Joycean."
Although, come to think of it, Matt's conflation of Stone and Godard might go some way towards explaining why I'm so frequently irritated while watching (or trying to watch) films by either of them. "Shaking up the viewer" can come perilously close to "alienating the viewer," and for this viewer, Stone and Godard both tend to cross that line more often than not. It's hard for a movie to force you into a new way of thinking about anything when you feel it trying to force you so insistently. To be totally vulgar and hyperbolic, I'd rather be seduced than raped. Thus, I find DEATH PROOF (even while I'd consider it minor Tarantino) more disturbing and thought-provoking than any Godard (or Stone) I've seen. It gets further under my skin precisely because I don't *feel* it getting under my skin; I just suddenly find it there. Despite all the cheerful ly frivolous banter on the surface, it's ultimately ice-cold, languid and elegant. You might say I find it almost...Kubrickian?
I found "Natural Born Killers" mainly sophomoric and headache-inducing, although I know a number of smart people who can mount elaborate defenses of it. It's definitely Godardian in many of its devices, though -- so are most of Stone's films from "The Doors" through "Any Given Sunday," most of which ("JFK" and "Nixon" excepted) tend to be brilliant in pieces and rather bludgeoning as a whole.
Joycean? I can't really think of a director who earns that tag, except maybe Stan Brakhage, and not even there, because Joyce's experiments tended to have some kind of narrative spine, where in Brakhage's cinema, the entire point is to force the viewer to participate and create the narrative.
Stone, in his hairy-chested madman way, did try to carry on in the Godard tradition, and I give him props for that even when his movies step on my toes, which is often. Even at their most overdetermined, I sense a clear emotional and intellectual connection to a world outside of the movie you're watching. With QT, as I said in my dialogue with Keith, I mainly sense a connection to movies.
I can see what Ted's getting at when he quotes MM saying the medium is the message, but MM wasn't just stating a fact; there was a critical, somewhat worried subtext there, implying that TV was mainly good at turning everything into television.
The pivotal question here is, can a movie that plays mainly on our own reaction to movies be considered as significant, as important, as a movie that makes a point of connecting itself to the outside world, and very deliberately provoking questions about what movies are and how they work on us? Is the latter sort of movie innately more serious, more worthy of study, than a film that's self-enclosed and ultimately somewhat sealed off from the world we decided to escape from a couple of hours when we bought a ticket?
QT's movies inspire profound and sometimes searching personal reactions in a lot of viewers, judging from the folks who came to his defense in the MZS/Uhlich thread from last spring. I know that counts for something, but is it all we need from movies?
I don't know the answer to that. I'm just asking.
I'd be more inclined to write QT off as a "mere" entertainer were it not for the fact that Hitchcock, a director who largely avoided real-world concerns except as fodder for plots (the nuclear bomb plot in "Notorious," a clinical description of mental illness in "Psycho"), is now generally recognized as one of the great artists of the 20th century in any medium -- an artist whose work inspired and challenged successive generations of both self-described entertainers and serious thinkers.
With hindsight, might QT be considered to be in that weight class? To put it another way, is he a filmmaker who raids Godard freely, but might be considered different from but equal to Godard?
I can see what Ted's getting at when he quotes MM saying the medium is the message, but MM wasn't just stating a fact; there was a critical, somewhat worried subtext there, implying that TV was mainly good at turning everything into television.
Matt, when you wrote that I suddenly recalled an article in the New York Times (IIRC) about the Myspace generation seeing life as a constant pose, an ever-ready photo-op, a sequence of moments to be staged and subsequently published for all the world to see -- party-pics being the sine qua non of social validation.
I have no idea if this sparks anything in your mind, and I can't quite pinpoint a deeper truth here, but hey, this is the internet. If half-formed thoughts aren't welcome in cyberspace...
...then this blog would have folded a month after it began!
Dunno where to go with your half-formed thought, except to say that for me it plays into my concern that Tarantino's references are primarily of interest (to me at least) as references, shout-outs that deepen the narrative (or at least make it more fun if you've got a sense of film history) but that don't necessarily re-interpret, subvert or otherwise illuminate the thing being referenced.
One example that springs to mind is Tarantino's appropriation of the adrenaline shot anecdote from Scorsese's documentary "American Boy," deployed, of course, in "Pulp Fiction." That's an incredibly exciting sequence, a real pleasure (pain!) to watch with an audience. But for me it's not on the same level as, say, Scorsese referencing the wedding/baptism sequence in "The Godfather" via the post-Lufthansa-heist massacre in "Goodfellas," which is as nasty and mundane as Coppola's sequence is magnificently operatic. It's not just an appropriation, there's an element of commentary too: by reminding you of Coppola's "Godfather" films, "Goodfellas" says, "This is what it's really like."
QT seems to have more of a scavenger/cargo cult mindset, which is very much in tune with pop culture post-'80s, from film and TV to popular music and visual art. He does turn the scavenged parts into something fresh, though, as evidenced by all the filmmakers who in some way aped Tarantino but didn't quite reproduce his essence. He makes it seem easy, but clearly it's not.
futurefree: What thoughts were provoked by "Death Proof"? I liked the movie better than I expected to, but I can't say it's haunted or even obsessed me.
futurefree:
[DEATH PROOF] gets further under my skin precisely because I don't *feel* it getting under my skin; I just suddenly find it there. Despite all the cheerful ly frivolous banter on the surface, it's ultimately ice-cold, languid and elegant.
That's basically the way I feel about Death Proof, and I might dismiss it as minor Tarantino if I didn't find myself genuinely bothered by it in ways that his other films, as good as they may be, don't approach or even bother to approach. It still essentially takes place in a world that seems more movie-based than realistic, and QT's dialogue is as self-consciously stylized as ever. But this time he seems to have taken extra care to make most of his major characters basically unsympathetic---except, tellingly, Stuntman Mike when the tables are gruesomely turned on his "game"---and thus make the violence seem more disquietingly detached and emotionally complex than is usually the case with his other films (there was a lot of gore on display in Kill Bill Vol. 1, for instance, but it's all presented in a deliberately weightless manner that dares you to actually take any of it seriously). If the film can be said to be a deconstruction, it's not necessarily of the '70s racing-car flicks he so lovingly references in the film---the slasher genre seems to be the genre QT is trying to play around with, with its hedonistic cannon-fodder victims and main boogeyman who's made slightly more sympathetic than those victims (esp. the second batch of women, who seem to show the same lack of humanity that Stuntman Mike does not only when they're beating up on him at the end, but also, for instance, when they deliberately leave their poor Hollywood-actress friend to the skeezy-looking car seller). Stuntman Mike certainly gets his just rewards at the end, but the ending feels less triumphant than simply nihilistic and brutal---and perhaps that's as it should be, as that's precisely what most slasher movies are.
At least, that's why it gets to me, anyway. (Keith touched on similar reasons in that very fine conversation with Matt about QT, by the way; dunno if he sees some of the same things I see in Death Proof.)
Matt's question about whether movies that deal with the real world in some way are innately more valuable than movies that basically make other movies as their main frame of reference is a fascinating one, one that I often found myself pondering when I embarked on this project. I tried to avoid taking an overt stand on that question in my essay (hopefully I succeeded) in order to provoke other questions; besides, even if I admitted a preference for one kind of film over another, most likely I'd have to qualify that preference with all sorts of exceptions and risk being considered rather inconsistent in my tastes. Sometimes I like the idea of movies that comment in some way on other movies (and part of my fascination with Godard is that, before seeing his work, I hadn't really grasped that movies could do that), while at other times I tend to take more seriously movies that do refer to some tangible social reality. This may be a cop-out response, ultimately, but it may well depend on one's own taste and views of both of art and the world---and worldviews are as varied as the people that hold them.
(Sorry if that last sentence sounded somewhat cheesy, lol.)
I think the suggestion that Stone is closer to the modern-day Godard than Tarantino is pretty damn on the nose. Certainly the Stone of JFK, Natural Born Killer, and Nixon anyway.
Actually, I think the biggest difference between Godard and Tarantino can be summarized in their choice of material. This was mentioned in the article, but I think it needs to be stressed that Tarantino's idea of "low culture" is a WHOLE lot lower than Godard's. A WHOLE lot lower.
I despise the whole idea of seeing films according to their historical context. I mean, this is something we could debate about for hours, in short I think that that is useful if you are a historian and are looking at films as facts. But if you're looking at them as art, you need to put as few filters on as possible, and considering historical context is a filter.
But I wonder you know, if the "trash" Godard celebrated in the sixties was possibly as "trashy" as the trash Tarantino celebrates today. In this day and age, I think that Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray are pretty much accepted as great filmmakers. But were they really the Godardian equivalent to Tarantino's adoration of Revenge of the Cheerleaders?
The skinny of it, is that Godard's comparatively high-end selection of material makes him more hermitically sealed than Tarantino. Godard is credited as a "thinker"; and I think that's accurate for bad as well as good. He's the quintessential coffee shop intellectual-- all talk and no action. (This is very French).
In contrast, Tarantino's far more low-end selection of material makes him much more a "man of the people". Compare for example how Vietnam comes up in Pulp Fiction with how it comes up in Godard's work. I think it may be overly simplistic to say that Tarantino is an "entertainer", he divorces himself entirely from the elitism and condesceding attitude that is characteristic of Godard's work.
Alex:
I despise the whole idea of seeing films according to their historical context. I mean, this is something we could debate about for hours, in short I think that that is useful if you are a historian and are looking at films as facts. But if you're looking at them as art, you need to put as few filters on as possible, and considering historical context is a filter.
I won't say much about this now except wait for Friday's installment and then we can go back and forth on it if you wish.
The skinny of it, is that Godard's comparatively high-end selection of material makes him more hermitically sealed than Tarantino. Godard is credited as a "thinker"; and I think that's accurate for bad as well as good. He's the quintessential coffee shop intellectual-- all talk and no action. (This is very French).
Godard may be a "coffee shop intellectual," but at least he seems to be thinking about real-world issues within a real-world context even in his more overtly deconstructionist early-'60s works. That's more than you can say about Tarantino; the issues he's more concerned with are seemingly those inspired by the vast amount of movies he's seen. Again, more on this later in the week.
I look forward to reading this as a whole, but pardon my premature "hating"- it seems to be based upon the assumption that Godard's work is more "political" (or "social" "cultural" whatever!) than Tarantino's. I myself sort of despise Tarantino ('Jackie Brown' is the only one of his movies I even like) but there's way more going on in his movies than many (including his supporters) want to realize.
It seems a bit condescending to QT to justify his work by suggesting it's simply the logical extension of po-mo self-reflexiveness and not, delve into what Tarantino is actually saying. It's as film-school simple as Denby's "Godard made a lyrical work of art in Breathless out of his memories of casually crappy American B-movies"; those casually crappy B-movies were already lyrical, wasn't that in part, Godard's actual point?!
I always thought the post-Lufthansa montage of dead bodies was more the end of Roger Corman's St. Valentine's Day Massacre (complete with narrator describing how so and so died and slow dollies in on the bodies) then The Godfather, but, hey.
Whenever people get into these big debates about how Tarantino has nothing to say and is hollow and shallow, it bugs me the way people assume Tarantino is this ignorant, immature nerd with zero knowledge of anything like history, literature, politics, or whatever. That he's never read a book in his life, that he's a virtually illiterate spaz who somehow got lucky by splattering violence all over the screen. Conversations like that always seem to end up pointing out that he never even finished high school, never mind did'nt go to college!
Well, just off the top of my head, Kubrick, David Lean, and Micheal Powell did'nt go to college either.
I mean, this is a guy who's a huge fan of both Stephen King and Elmore Leonard. You can't read King and Leonard's novels without being exposed to some content of literature, history, sociology, whatever: at the very least, I can say from personal experience that King lead me to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner; that Leonard introduced me to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet and Ernest Hemingway. I'd imagine they probably did the same for Quentin.
And even if he had never done anything but watch movies, so what? Can't movies have an intellectual effect on their audiences too?
The whole thing just seems to bespeak a real snobbishness, this notion that film is inherently the province of people who can't hack it as novelists or playwrights or theoretical critics or something. Y'know, if you're not Vladimer Nabakov or Suzan Lori Parks or Laura Mulvey, then you're not worth our respect.
Whatever. I like Tarantino, and I like Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman, and Tony Kushner, and Joss Whedon, and Stephen King, and if you're going to appreciate these people at all, you have to take their entire body of work into account, not just what's considered respectable. We can't just praise them for Jackie Brown and From Hell and American Gods and then ignore Tom Strong and Eternals and Kill Bill because it does'nt fit some definition of serious art.
ted pigeon wrote: "I will also look forward to your piece on Death Proof. Most of the criticism I've read of it has been surprisingly shallow..."
Surprisingly shallow is exactly how I would describe Death Proof. I find the level of discussion to which Tarantino's work is elevated a bit odd. I think reading or watching numerous interviews with Tarantino himself should make it quite clear that there is little more than surface to his work. Which isn't to discredit it as art or something worthy of some discussion, but as Matt pointed out, it's a bit disturbing that he'd represent where we are as a society.
I recently watched DePalma's Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, and was thinking how much, at least superficially, they reminded me of Tarantino (although much less willing to break the 4th wall, they are "plasticky," movie-movies that are as much about their references and style than about anything real-world). That being said, I would say DePalma's films are way more intelligent than Tarantino's, which strike me as exceedingly clever, but not "smart. " If that makes any sense...
JJ: "I always thought the post-Lufthansa montage of dead bodies was more the end of Roger Corman's St. Valentine's Day Massacre (complete with narrator describing how so and so died and slow dollies in on the bodies) then The Godfather, but, hey."
Shit, you're right. I haven't seen that movie since junior high and I'd forgotten about that sequence.
Guess I should have chosen a different example!
anonymous:
I think reading or watching numerous interviews with Tarantino himself should make it quite clear that there is little more than surface to his work.
Well, as interesting as director interviews and such may be, I don't strictly take stock in what they say about their own work. "Trust the art, not the artist"---isn't there a saying that goes something like that? However, it goes, that's what I believe, personally. (I wonder if Hitchcock would be taken as seriously as he is by many if we simply took him at his word when talking about his own work...)
Matt asked me: "What thoughts were provoked by "Death Proof"? I liked the movie better than I expected to, but I can't say it's haunted or even obsessed me."
I wouldn't say "haunted" or "obsessed" so much as "rattled," although even that word implies some kind of IRREVERSIBLE-style gut-wrenching experience..."subtly rattled," maybe? It all goes back to something I think I've mentioned in other posts: Tarantino is one of the only directors I can think of whose approach to cinematic violence successfully acknowledges (not always, but sometimes) both how inherently horrific it is as a rupture in human lives, and how - for lack of a better descriptor - "cool" it is as a cinematic device.
Some (most?) would argue that QT doesn't see the horror, that the nastiness of some of his characters' fates (and the brutality of the characters who bring about their fates) is just there to add cheap shock value, which is just another kind of "coolness." I disagree. I think he (more often than not) wants the violence he portrays to feel complicated, to be simultaneously dismaying and "awesome." Most directors opt for one or the other (or, in many cases, they go for the latter while gesturing feebly and unconvincingly in the direction of the former - cough cough Park Chan-wook cough cough). QT, in the deaths portrayed in DEATH PROOF and elsewhere, is attempting to crank both knobs up at the same time, and I find the effect queasily powerful, and one of his greatest strengths as a filmmaker when he chooses to apply it.
Sure, you can point to something like the Bruce/Maynard/samurai sword sequence in PULP FICTION as an example of violence presented solely to gratify the audience, and you'd mostly be right (there's actually something else I find very interesting going on in that scene, but it's not really related to what I'm talking about here, although I'd be glad to expound on it if you're curious). But he's also capable of going completely in the opposite direction and presenting violence in memorable ways utterly devoid of "coolness," too - think of DeNiro and Jackson's deaths in JACKIE BROWN, which are sudden, unceremonious, and oddly melancholy. Or that wrenching moment in RESERVOIR DOGS (a movie I admire and can't stand in roughly equal measures) when Tim Roth gets mortally wounded while attempting a carjacking in his robber-guise and reflexively blows away his attacker. The shot immediately afterward is described in the screenplay as something like, "CU on his face as he realizes what's been done to him, and what he's done." And you really feel it, as he's feeling it - moments ago he was doing all right, and now he's a murderer, and he's dying. And it hurts.
This is sort of tangential, but after my "Kubrickian" comment I did some Kubrick/QT Googling in the hopes of finding any comments they may have made about each other (temporarily forgetting that Kubrick:interview::Halley's comet:sighting). In doing so I stumbled upon this, from an old QT interview (in which, ha ha, he actually makes a jab at Kubrick):
"I wanted to subvert the Hollywood staples, but with respect, not in a superior or pastichey way," Tarantino says. "If you take a film like The Shining, I always felt that Kubrick felt he was above the horror genre, above giving the audience a real good scare. Now Godard, I always thought, was at his most engaging when he worked within a genre and ran with it the whole way to the moon. Breathless is a good example. Jean-Pierre Melville did it with the thriller genre, subverting it but with respect. I mean, a cinephile can watch those films and theorise about them but a regular guy who wants to see a good movie can get into them too. The thing is to tell a good story. My structures might be complex, but I tell very simple stories."
I'm not saying filmmakers are always, or even usually, right about their own work, but this idea of "subverting with respect" actually goes along with what I'm trying to argue. Something like Haneke's FUNNY GAMES, as painful and thought-provoking as it is, is made in a spirit of open contempt for the kind of movie it's subverting (even while it is in many ways a very skillful example of that kind of movie). QT in DEATH PROOF, on the other hand, acknowledges the crude pleasures of a trashily brutal revenge flick, and wants to recreate them, even outdo them, but he also wants to face up to the uneasiness and dismay underneath those pleasures, albeit in ways that don't break the surface tension, so to speak, of the story.
The rest of that article is available here - http://www.quentintarantino.org/Articles/magazine.shtml - if anyone's curious. I thought there were a few interesting nuggets here and there.
futurefree: Thanks for that.
QT's pretty schizo about his attitude toward violence. There's definitely a nasty-boy thrill to a lot of it, and also a strange weightlessness-- like the scene where Marvin gets his head blown off in "Pulp Fiction" -- there's humor there, but the horror is purely theoretical -- and if that's the point, it's not anything to brag about, since Kubrick and Scorsese often showed that it's possible to sense the characters' amusement at sadism while still being appalled by what they do. But you're right, sometimes he does wipe the smirk off his face and really give violence a sting -- those two deaths in "Jackie Brown" that you mentioned, and the Tim Roth incident in "Reservoir Dogs," are great examples of that.
Bottom line: I think deep down, Tarantino fears his own power over the audience. That's why he keeps backing away from it with the dialogue or visual equivalent of "just kidding." If he ever decides to truly delve into the charnel house of his subconscious, and divest himself of all the tics and crutches and various insulating devices we've come to think of as Tarantino-esque, the result could force detractors to rethink everything they think they know about him, and open up an entirely new, equally fruitful phase of his career.
"Death Proof" seems a step in that direction. A baby step, but definitely a step.
futurefree:
Well, you articulated some of my own thoughts on Death Proof better than I did, so thanks! I definitely felt that same punch throughout.
As far as his approach to violence goes, I hope Death Proof represents a baby step in the right direction, because for once the violence actually got me to think about the meaning of the violence in the types of movies QT references, and the people inflicting that violence, in ways that neither Kill Bill movie quite managed to do.
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