The essence of Tarantino films
Filmmaker’s works, style difficult to label
Director Quentin Tarantino has a style all his own, and his latest film, “Django Unchained,” is no exception. But what exactly defines a Tarantino film? Creative storytelling? Violence? Dialogue? It’s a question even he struggles to answer.
What, exactly, is a Quentin Tarantino movie? How would you describe one?
“Oh, gosh,” Tarantino said in a recent interview, “you’re asking me questions that critics should be telling me. I’m not the one who should be criticizing my own movies. I’m not at the place in my life where I can be that subtextual about my work. Part of my thing is to not think about stuff like that.”
Now, this is not entirely true. In even a brief conversation — ostensibly about his latest film, “Django Unchained,” a combination buddy flick, slavery-revenge story and spaghetti Western that opens Tuesday, Dec. 25 — it quickly becomes clear that Tarantino can be
subtextual about anything. He’s a born storyteller; the words flow quickly, easily, falling into place. But the question did seem to give him genuine pause.
For a minute or two, anyway. He gave it a shot: “I am drawn to genre cinema. But I am an artist going my own way and telling my own stories. I have my own sensibilities and things I want to do, but I like doing it in the guise of a genre film that can be entertaining and fun to watch. So I don’t want them to be art-film meditations on genre. I want them to deliver the goods that you get from those genres, but it’ll be dancing to my tune.”
There’s no question about that. “Django” is a hybrid that you couldn’t imagine any other filmmaker even pitching, much less making. But it’s been that way from the start. With his hyperviolent debut, “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino was obviously hearing music in his head no one else was.
How else to explain the gangster Mr. White, as “Stuck in the Middle With You” played, slicing off a cop’s ear and sing
ing into it?
OK, that’s what people remember from that movie. That or the profane intro in which the gangsters discuss Madonna, among other things. Or the rapid-fire dialogue, the jumping around in time. So his first time out, Tarantino established himself and his movies as literate, violent, filthy and witty. And all of those descriptions still fit.
But who remembers the smaller things about “Reservoir Dogs,” like Mr. Orange, before heading out undercover, looking into the mirror and saying, as a way of trying to convince himself, “Nobody knows who you are, because you’re supercool.”
Or later, as the tortured, now semi-earless uniformed policeman slumps in his chair as the bleeding Mr. Orange comes clean: “I’m a cop.” And the tied-up officer replies: “I know.”
It’s chilling, and it’s pretty great.
An original?
“What distinguishes a Tarantino movie from others, or from a typical Hollywood movie, is the creative nature of his storytelling,” Jerome Courshon, a film-distribution consultant,
said. “It’s unique, inventive and not something you’ve typically seen before.
“Coupled with this is his visual style as a director — powerful, compelling, irresistible. And on top of all that, the dialogue he writes is engaging, different. Again, not the typical dialogue that we see and hear every day in movies and TV. This is why when someone says ‘Tarantinostyle,’ we know what that means.” Ah, another variation on that dance-toyour-own-tune theme. Perhaps that plays out the way it does because, to hear Tarantino tell it, he’s not always in charge of where the story takes him (and us).
“You’ve got to go with your own scenario, certainly the way I write,” he said. “I kind of conjure up the characters and, especially at a certain point in the scenario, they take over. They kind of go their own way. I might have certain plans I want them to do, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. I’m hoping they get there, but if they end up somewhere else, they were never meant to go where I wanted them to go. Maybe some people could say that’s for better or worse, but I really do let my characters decide.”
A copycat?
“What is a Quentin Tarantino movie? It’s a series of long, involved chunks of onanistic, meaningless dialogue interspersed with random explosions of violence, resulting in a fascist postmodern celebration of racism, death and misogyny,” said Wheeler Winston Dixon, the coordinator of the film-studies program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“It’s sheer exploitation filmmaking with no resonance, taste or value, but it delivers what the action crowd wants: violence, violence and more violence, all served up with a knowing wink in a very postmodern fashion. In short, Quentin Tarantino movies are long, empty, derivative and junk food for the mind, with no substance or nutritional value.”
Strong words and fair criticism, even if you don’t agree with it. Tarantino’s movies are, above all, ripe, bursting with homages to old films; like the musician Beck, even the stuff he makes up seems familiar. But they are often criticized as exercises in form over substance. He’s a first-class movie geek, with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and an obvious love for it.
He is also unafraid to break taboos, such as the frequent use of the N-word. It’s either in service to art or gratuitously racist, depending on whom you ask.
If you ask Tarantino, in regards to “Django Unchained,” which reportedly contains more utterances of the Nword than any movie, ever, you get the answer you’d expect.
“OK, it’s like, excessive use of the N-word in what degree? Excessive use for 1858 in Mississippi? Nobody has had the (guts) to actually say, ‘You used it more excessively than they used it at that time period in Mississippi.’ No one has the gall to say that, because everyone knows it’s not true. So basically their whole criticism boils down to the fact that I should be lying or I should be prettying up the situation.”
Some of “Django” is indeed hard to sit through. It’s meant to be. “If you’re going to do a movie about slavery, you’re actually going to show some things that are hard to see and you’re going to hear some things that are hard to hear,” Tarantino said.
He’s right about that. But the movie is also a rewarding revenge fantasy, something Tarantino is familiar with. In “Inglourious Basterds” (SPOILER ALERT), Tarantino kills Hitler. (“I didn’t know I was going to do it until the day before I did it.”) He doesn’t exactly free the slaves in the latest film, but he does free one, the title character, played brilliantly by Jamie Foxx, who then goes on a quest to free his wife, from whom slave owners have separated him. Bought and freed by Christoph Waltz’s Dr. Schultz and set up as a bounty hunter, Django at one point says, “Kill White people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?”
It’s a funny line, but it also gets at the pain inflicted on Django all his life. This the line Tarantino continually walks, between just enough and too much. Sometimes he goes too far. But in the context of his films, often he gets it right.
Kitchen sink?
“A Tarantino movie is a lumpy, high-cholesterol stew of insolence; irony; fetishism (of weapons, cars, women — their bodies and minds); tongue-in-cheekiness; loving homage to cinema of all kinds; technical virtuosity; and an immature though sometimes profound expression of the desire for cosmic justice, always achieved through violence and sadism,” said Michael Green, a lecturer in the film and media studies program at Arizona State University.
“I kind of want a little bit of everything in the course of the movies,” Tarantino said. And he usually provides it. For those who like his movies, that pop-culture mashup is one of the main attractions. The slow trip around the block set to “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson? Perfect. John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s dance in “Pulp Fiction,” arguably the most-influential movie of the 1990s? Genius.
New from old
“A Tarantino movie is one that looks like a collage or a pastiche when examined too minutely, but that, when one stands back, proves to be a single piece,” said Aaron Barlow, author of “Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes.” “A Tarantino movie is closely woven strands creating a new whole, a brand-new blanket composed of the threads of many others, some worn out, others deliberately picked apart.”
That answers another question: Does it add up to anything, these bits and pieces of inspiration tied together by selfaware dialogue and shocking visuals? For the most part, it does. Yes, he sometimes lets his selfindulgent tendencies get the best of him. But for those willing to follow him, his films are almost always a rollicking journey
We’ve come this far and, frankly, we may be no closer to defining a Tarantino movie than when we started. If it were left to Tarantino, he’d say we were thinking about it too much. He told a story about being at the Sundance Institute, working on “Reservoir Dogs,” when a resource director asked him if he had done his subtext work.
“I go, ‘What’s that?’ And they go, ‘Aha! You think you’re the writer. You think you know everything, but you don’t know everything. You need to do your subtext work. That’s what a director does.’ ”
So he drills deep into a scene and comes up with all sorts of motivation and context, a deeper meaning for the actions of the characters involved.
“I realized, wow, all this deep subtext was there that I didn’t even realize, because I was operating on the surface.
“But then I also realized, that was a really fun exercise, but I don’t want to know that anymore. I don’t want to know how all those things connect like that. I don’t mind knowing after I’m done with the whole process, but I don’t want to hit those nails with a hammer. It’s wonderful to know that it’s there. But now that I know it’s there, I don’t need to know it by name.”
Just call it what it is: a Tarantino movie.