On Tarantino

"Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery"

Quentin Tarantino has been doing a lot of talking lately, and it’s been impacting my ability to enjoy his films. Or perhaps more accurately, it has underlined certain tendencies in his films that I increasingly find disquieting. There is ugliness in this man’s worldview that wasn’t always so apparent to me, and if you’ll forgive me for helping prolong the current Tarantino discourse, I’d like to use this space to try to work through my feelings.

Within the generally rapturous critical and popular reception that greeted Tarantino’s early films, a vocal minority wondered if there wasn’t a certain hollowness at the centre of his pastiche-art. “Don’t expect any of the life experiences of the old movie sources to leak through; punchy, flamboyant surface is all,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum of Pulp Fiction. But over time, as his ambitions have grown and his films have tackled difficult subjects like the Holocaust and American slavery, Tarantino’s project has developed an edge of media criticism. One of his key ideas is that cinema has been unfair to victims of historical oppression by perpetuating stories of their victimhood. “Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” Tarantino told the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg while promoting Inglourious Basterds (2009). “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery.” One of his most innovative ideas has been to depart from the facts of history to show the victims prevail, turning the tables on their oppressors and inflicting the kind of violence to which they have historically been subject.

Jeffrey Goldberg is a former Israeli Defense Forces prison guard and a current high-profile advocate for Zionism, so you might expect him to have been a receptive ear for this. Instead, Goldberg was alarmed by the “cruelty” of the film’s final scene, where Brad Pitt and Eli Roth’s Jewish avengers carve a swastika into the forehead of Christoph Waltz’s Nazi. “It’s torture. Isn’t torture wrong?” asked Goldberg—to which Tarantino replied, after a ten-second pause, “He’s a Nazi. They’re giving him a scar. I don’t know if I would even go so far as to call that torture.” While calling the film “greatly entertaining,” Goldberg left with “ambivalence,” and became one of the few notable commentators at the time to identify ominous implications in its politics:

“When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview, I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank. But when my blood cooled, I began to think about the morality of kosher porn in the context of our current Middle East politics. Some of this was informed by my own experience in the Israeli army, in which I saw my fellow Jewish soldiers do moral things—such as risking their lives to prevent the murder of innocent Jews—as well as immoral things, like beating the hell out of Palestinians because they could.”

Most of us agree that not all violence is the same—that slave revolts and ghetto uprisings and many other forms of self-defense are morally justifiable. Tarantino goes a step further, arguing that violence can be good, full stop. He believes in a clear division of right and wrong, and that it is correct and good to punish wrongdoers with their own tactics. In considering the past, Tarantino has no patience for equivocations about the fog of war or it being “a different time,” which is a perspective I have a lot of sympathy for. Knowing how many Nazi war criminals escaped justice and lived the rest of their lives peacefully in our midst, it’s very satisfying when Lt. Aldo Raine carves that swastika in Col. Landa’s forehead. Who doesn’t like to see Nazis get their comeuppance? It was only when seeing Tarantino pose for photos at an IDF base shortly after October 7 that I began considering how easily his binary sense of justice and morality can go awry.

Tarantino has been on a lot of people’s minds lately because of his recent two-part appearance on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, in which he unveiled his list of his 20 favourite movies of the 21st century. A lot could be said about his picks and justifications, but let’s not. I want to focus on his much-discussed comments about There Will Be Blood: “The flaw is Paul Dano. Obviously, it’s supposed to be a two-hander, but it’s also drastically obvious that it’s not a two-hander. [Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister. Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role. He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. The weakest fucking actor in SAG!”

Let’s save some time and take it as given that Tarantino misunderstands the film and Dano’s performance. Something that his comments suggest is a contempt for weakness—something I can’t un-see in him now that I’ve seen it. One Twitter user observed, “His films are fantasies of being a total badass—the good guys are bad asses, the bad guys are bad asses—so a character actor who is supposed to be pathetic scans as incomprehensible to him.” Reading the Jeffrey Goldberg piece from 2009, that line “Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery” makes me queasy. How much trust do I really want to give to an artist who thinks the problem with Holocaust movies is the “big misery”—like, that real drag, that total bummer they’re always building to? And his more recent comments have me wondering: can a contempt for stories of victimhood be related to a contempt for victims?

I should say: the reason any of this matters to me is because his films are thorny, ambiguous, and generally better than their author’s interviews. Take, for example, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a troubling film about the winds of change that hit America in the 1960s that is, unusually, on the side of the old guard. This caught me by surprise, because prior to its release, I had pegged Tarantino as essentially—though with plenty of asterisks and qualifiers—a progressive. In the press cycles for Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, he talked a lot about wanting to empower his female, Jewish, and Black viewers; now he makes a movie where the racist Manson disciples have been recast as hippie wokescolds, and Bruce Lee is an uppity loudmouth who needs to be humbled by an ageing American stuntman.

But the film’s conception of the old-guard protagonists is not without texture and complication. At the very end, when the Manson murders are foiled and Rick Dalton is welcomed into the Polanski/Tate inner sanctum, Tarantino is pining for an alternate timeline where the old guard didn’t die, and was instead integrated into the new… but I think the subtext is that this didn’t happen, and couldn’t. The violent climax is possible only through a startling tonal shift into pure fantasy; afterwards, when Rick Dalton enters the Tate/Polanski home, Tarantino ends with a crane shot and a melancholy piece of music that communicate something sadder. Elsewhere, Leonardo DiCaprio pulls off a nuanced bit of acting during the scene where Rick imagines himself in the Steve McQueen role from The Great Escape. Where McQueen exuded cool without seeming to try, Rick Dalton lards on superficial charisma. He’s not bad, but he’s not iconic.

I recently revisited Death Proof (2007)—a film that, in light of the plot’s resonances with a notorious on-set injury during the production of Kill Bill, has been retroactively interpreted by some as an “auto-critique.” The first half is a slasher pastiche, the second half is a vehicular mayhem movie (Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry are repeatedly cited in dialogue), and they tell parallel stories with different endings: a group of young, attractive women talk, talk, and talk some more while the villainous Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) slowly creeps up on them. The first half takes place at a dive bar where Stuntman Mike is the oldest patron. He rattles off his long list of mid-century credits while the young’uns stare at him blankly. They know nothing of the history he represents. He kills them with ease. In the second half, Stuntman Mike’s four potential victims include two stuntwomen who are well-versed in the history of grindhouse movies; one who rises to the occasion; and one ditzy starlet who the others leave behind to be raped by a hillbilly. This last scene is played for laughs, and complicates the extent to which this can be accepted as a quasi-feminist spin on the slasher genre as a whole, or a “progressive” counterpoint to the first half. It’s a moment that overshadows the rest of the movie in my memory.

I give him credit for being an artist who is willing to challenge and upset his audience with moments like that. I think what I’m left with is a filmography that is worth thinking about, but not one that I think of with much warmth. I’m troubled by the limits of Tarantino’s empathy. He likes the stuntwomen, but not the starlet.