Tarantino's films derive their force from a combination of elements which both surprise and delight and shock and dismay. I have in mind representations of violence which combine the murderously uncontrolled with the balletic; or his hoodlums, reflective brutes who kill and yet speak a language of moral discrimination; or the power of the films to affect us strongly-indeed to be direct assaults upon our sensibilities-and yet also to achieve a powerful allusive resonance. They disturb and cite; we cower and make connections. Tarantino can take pleasure both in the traumatising of his audiences and in their "creativity and ingenuity." His films make victims and critics of us.
The choreographed shoot-outs in True Romance and Reservoir Dogs, these three-way stand-offs, place the combatants in triangular order, momentarily frozen at starting positions as if in readiness for some rule-governed contest, only to slide into unregulated murder. The films' narrative lines converge with similar order, the convergence sparking destruction, not resolution.
There is then a comic combination of the controlled and the chaotic; there is a similarly comic combination of civility and viciousness at play in the films, especially in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Debates on the etiquette of tipping or the propriety of a foot massage precede a heist or the humiliation and killing of young drug dealers. This sensitivity to the nuances of social behaviour and indifference to whether people live or die, this attention to manners and disregard for primary ethical obligations, is so troubling that it has to be comic.
Occasionally, Tarantino will invert this order and thereby achieve pathos in place of comedy. In True Romance, Clarence's father, Cliff, pressed by the mafioso Coccotti to rat on Clarence and Alabama, first denies that he has seen them, then denies that he knows their whereabouts, then-certain that torture will force an admission-provokes Coccotti into killing him outright. "I don't know if you know this or not," he says, "Sicilians were spawned by niggers." And so he goes on until Coccotti puts a gun to his head and shoots him. Thus does a father lay down his life for his son, not with sweetness and decorum, but with a speech of the grimiest racism, and thus are we both drawn to, and repelled by, Cliff, whose racism is more than tactical but whose willingness to die for Clarence is admirable.
Consider, too, the combination of the allusive with the sensational. The allusive-by referring outside the film-resists the insistent demand of film that we submit to the illusion of reality at 24 frames a second. By contrast, the sensational demands that we take unconditionally that illusion to be reality.
Shocking, scaring film audiences have been part of the aesthetic of the cinema since its inception. We are told that people instinctively ducked their heads when Lumi?re's train pulled into the station. In his seminal book, Theory of Film Practice, Noel Burch analyses the forms of aggression the film image is capable of inflicting on the viewer. He describes this as "aesthetic aggression" and speaks of the viewer in this context as a "victim." Pain, he asserts, is part of aesthetic experience. When the pain is acute, it returns the viewer to reality as, if only defensively, he reminds himself, "It's only a movie." But by then, as Burch remarks, it is too late: "The harm will already have been done; intense discomfort, and perhaps even terror, will have crept across the threshold." Burch's example is the sliced eyeball in Luis Bu?uel's Un Chien Andalou; we might take the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs or the needle in the heart in Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino's films are indeed celebrations of the allusive. There is the auteur aspect, the films circling and recircling the same preoccupations, characters in one film mentioned in another, family resemblances connecting these films and relating them to their auteur parent. There is the novelistic aspect in the playing with narrative. Revealing the events out of sequence, rather than through the convention of flashbacks, derives from Tarantino's sense of the formal possibilities of the novel. There is the genre aspect, for example, in the titles, or in the casting of Reservoir Dogs, or the relation of the films to other films, say Natural Born Killers to Bonnie and Clyde, or True Romance to Badlands and Blood Simple.
But to read Tarantino talking about his films is to experience a dramatic drop in intellectual energy. Take this from the preface to the screenplay of Reservoir Dogs.
"To me, violence is a totally aesthetic subject. Saying you don't like violence in movies is like saying you don't like dance sequences in movies. I do like dance sequences in movies, but if I didn't, it doesn't mean I should stop dance sequences from being made. When you're doing violence in movies, there's going to be a lot of people who aren't going to like it, because it's a mountain they can't climb. And they're not jerks. They're just not into that. There are other things that they can see. If you can climb that mountain, then I'm going to give you something to climb."
One is struck by the intellectual poverty of Tarantino's remarks. But even more dispiriting is the fact that Tarantino is not doing justice to his own work. To treat dance sequences and violence sequences as comparable aesthetic events is to miss at least two points.
First, it misses the extent to which the viewer's pain has become part of a Tarantino film's aesthetic. Dance sequences are not assaults upon the viewer. Gene Kelly's routines did not precipitate heart attacks. Second, dance is an art form which it is the invariably pedestrian task of film to reproduce; it is already an aesthetic subject. Violence, by contrast, is just a chaos on which film operates as the primary artist.
Yet the films are, at least at present, incapable of solely aesthetic contemplation. The films give tutorials in "cool." We have to acknowledge a new character, the "Taranteeny," who dresses in a particular way, likes certain kinds of films and boasts an expertise in pop culture. We are witnessing the phenomenon of a modern-day Wertherism. Tarantino is, in the phrase of one of his biographers, a "1990s icon."
Tarantino's work invites imitation at the level of style. This is where, in Michael Wood's observation, "Tarantino" is "less the name of an author than the name of an idea about the world, probably shared by many people below a certain age." Alabama's message to Clarence at the end of True Romance-"you're so cool"-is praise that many in that film's audience will seek to earn.
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are remarkable films, and True Romance is a remarkable screenplay, but the recent Crimson Tide is trite and Natural Born Killers is trite and something worse. It is a psychotic version of True Romance. Mickey and Mallory are the creations of an exasperated, jaded imagination, in which the desire to shock by more and more extreme versions of the tension between sentiment and violence, between the harmonies of love and the disharmonies of vice, becomes a free-standing imperative. It offers the spectacle of infatuation and serial murder. It is this screenplay in particular that makes one gloomy about Tarantino's future.
