STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
Tarantino’s movies tend to look back to the ’70s. But his latest looks ahead to the decade.
Speaking to Deadline about what drew him to the milieu of Los Angeles in 1969 in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino has gestured to its status as a threshold moment for both actors and directors.
For Tarantino, 1969 is a door through which one could walk across a field of overripe westerns through to the plains of
New Hollywood auteur projects like Easy Rider. It wasn’t just that pompadoured TV actors with distinctive mugs like George Maharis and Vince Edwards, two of the models for Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt’s soon-to-be-has-beens, weren’t well-suited to the brave new world of breezy long-haired leading men about to replace them. It was that there was a sea change in culture that “none of them saw coming.”
This dread about the apocalyptic potential of the 1970s, which as the filmmaker tells it would usher in a wave of softer male movie stars and hippie waifs, is a new note for Tarantino, who has eagerly circled the decade from the start of his career, reanimating it through citation and cultural immersion.
A compulsive quoter of art from other eras, both high and low, Tarantino formed his movie-lover’s tastes as well as his referential sensibility as a filmmaker at a time when you couldn’t easily cross-reference an actor’s work (there was no IMDB) but had to know it cold (or, as he pointed out in a recent interview with Time, have an Ephraim Katz Film Encyclopedia at your side). Before he cautiously looked ahead to the 1970s, then, Tarantino looked back — not with anxiety but with a magpie’s delight at finding some distinctive old thing to repurpose as new.
While Tarantino has never set a story in this period before, its music famously set the pulse for his first film, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. A caper-gone-wrong about a group of strangers reuniting after a failed jewel heist left one of them seriously wounded, the film tips us off to Tarantino’s retrospective gaze from the opening set piece, a circular long take that pivots around the thieves’ pre-robbery diner lunch as Tarantino’s own character waxes lyrical about the true meaning of the Madonna hit Like a Virgin. Despite this start in the bubblegum pop cultural landscape of the ’80s, the conversation soon turns to K-billy’s Super Sounds of the ’70s Weekend, a radio marathon hosted by a deadpan DJ (voiced by Steven Wright).
Tarantino’s juxtaposition of Michael Madsen character’s shocking violence with K-billy’s well-timed needle drop of the Stealers Wheel hit Stuck in the Middle with You would launch the 1990s equivalent of a thousand think pieces about ironic movie violence and become the film’s signature 1970s throwback in most viewers’ minds. But his position statement on the period comes earlier, when the sleazy cool of George Baker Selection’s Little Green Bag — a chart-topper in 1970 — underscores the troupe’s stylized, Ray Ban and black-suited strut to their fateful destination over the opening credits. As much as Harvey Keitel’s presence lends a legitimacy to Tarantino’s scrawny CV, the song plants the film squarely in rich cultural soil, making us feel like happy discoverers of a film that’s always been around.
It’s fitting that K-billy’s ads boast of being “The station where the ’70s survived,” given Tarantino’s deliberately cultivated reputation in the films to come as a polisher of rusted stars. Chief among these is his repurposing in Pulp Fiction of John Travolta, then wasted in dreck like the Look Who’s Talking franchise after a creative downturn in the ’80s. Even more so than his savvy deployment of Keitel’s gravitas in his debut, Tarantino makes expert use of Travolta’s slightly rumpled star-of-yore mythos, embodied by his still-formidable cheekbones and wolfish smile as well as the throwback of his demonstrable skills on the dance floor.
Travolta’s lingering ’70s cool, burnished rather than tarnished by his survival in the intervening two decades or so, looks ahead to Tarantino’s casting in his followup, Jackie Brown. Steeped in blacksploitation tropes and music cues from such films as Across 110th Street, which would hint at the raging debate on the line between homage and appropriation in his work that would dog him soon after, Jackie Brown is anchored in a pair of unlikely movie star performances from Pam Grier and Robert Forster, which again seem wrested out of some alternate Hollywood history where both could get new movies greenlit. Namedropped in Reservoir Dogs and given a reverential introduction here, Grier in particular holds a commanding presence, equally weary and tough, in part for how she evokes a period of Hollywood action films just this side of the canon.
With Kill Bill and Death Proof, Tarantino even more fully embraces ’70s grindhouse cinema for the grimy authenticity and sense of tradition it gives his work. Announcing itself as “The 4th Film by Quentin Tarantino” in the credits, Kill Bill: Volume 1 locates the filmmaker’s signature in his gleeful repurposing of curios from other eras — particularly excessive pleasures like Bruce Lee’s yellow tracksuit from Game of Death and the siren tone from Quincy Jones’s score for Ironside. To view a film by Quentin Tarantino at this point is to be steeped in but not bound by the esthetic language of ’70s pulp cinema.
Packaged along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror as part of a limited engagement grindhouse revival, Death Proof is an even more explicit throwback to the quaint joys of old exploitation movie traditions. Like his earlier career resuscitations of once-loved actors, it’s also an unpretentious ode to the corporeal labour of stunt people who put their bodies on the line for their work, offering a rare lead role to stunt performer Zoë Bell. The film’s sadistic villain, Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell, himself the beneficiary of a Tarantino dust-off during a lull in his career), articulates the film’s ethos during a conversation about his work, where he yearns for such ’70s films as Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, born out of a time before computer-generated effects, with real cars smashing into real cars, “and real dumb people driving them.”
It stands to reason that Tarantino’s newest film will also evince this appreciation for the period that has yielded so much for him, albeit with the new dread of characters standing on the edge and facing their obsolescence rather than looking back with knowledge and beautifully weathered faces. What remains to be seen is whether that forward rather than retrospective look to 1970 comes with the same sense of respect and potential for rediscovery, a new tinge of reactionary paranoia about the young wiping out the old, or a deepened self-consciousness somewhere in between. With Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Tarantino is stuck in the middle, and eager to bring us along with him.