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the genre artist: quentin tarantino
I haven't seen Kill Bill yet, but based on the previews I'm guessing that it will confirm a hypothesis I have about Quentin Tarantino, namely: Tarantino doesn't make movies about people, he makes movies about other movies. I'm guessing that Kill Bill is going to enter into dialogue with the genres of kung-fu and samurai films in much the same way that Jackie Brown enters into dialogue with the genre of "blaxploitation", or (perhaps more relevantly) that the Tarantino-scripted From Dusk Till Dawn enters into dialogue with the Western and vampire horror.
I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with this—I'm interested in genre, and I think that it can certainly be a valid thematic concern for movies. One of the things I enjoy about Tarantino's films is that they commonly contain a level of meta-commentary: Jackie Brown, for instance, operates on one level as a serviceable crime drama, but operates at an entirely different level when the viewer has an awareness of Pam Grier's acting history (or for that matter, the acting history of Robert Forster). John Travolta in Pulp Fiction works in a similar way. Tarantino's segment in Four Rooms works only if you're familiar with the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" bit that it riffs off of. Etcetera.
The genre-play in Tarantino's very early work (I'm thinking particularly of Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino's script for True Romance) is even more interesting because it can be read as strangely personal. Both of these films focus on someone who operates mostly outside of the criminal subculture that the films are fascinated with. This role is filled in both films by a young, white "Generation X"-type character—True Romance's comic-book-store clerk Clarence, and Reservoir Dogs's comic-book-reading policeman Freddy. If we treat the other characters, the underworld types, as essentially genre figures (Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs explicitly calls out Mr. Blonde as a riff on Lee Marvin) then the fascination that the slacker protagonists demonstrate towards those characters strikes a distinct, oddly poingant autobiographical note: it is not hard to imagine young Tarantino, whose former career as a video-store clerk is well known, writing these scripts to explore his fascination with the artificial worlds that operate within genre. (It may be significant here that True Romance is littered with references to the LA movie industry and in fact ends with a shootout within a Hollywood director's offices.)
Pulp Fiction is especially curious and knotty. The distinction between the Gen-X outsider and the more hard-boiled genre characters collapses here. There is no obvious outsider figure, but all of the criminal characters seem to have taken on a Gen-X quality: great chunks of the film are given over to mundane discussions of pop culture minutia (what they call a Big Mac in France, etc.). (This has its counterpoint in the "Like A Virgin" speech in Reservoir Dogs, but there it is something of an anomaly, whereas in Pulp Fiction those kinds of discussions are much more the norm.) In addition, K. points out that while Reservoir Dogs and True Romance can be understood as narratives about an outsider attempting to get inside the world of genre, Pulp Fiction is instead about an insider trying to leave that world (Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield), to get back (as K. puts it) to a world where "language has meaning." I'm hesitant to read that as an autobiographical gesture, but it does lead interestingly to the less genrefied (although highly genre-conscious), more naturalistic world of Jackie Brown.
And now we have Kill Bill, which seems like it will be hyper-genrefied, if I may indulge in coining such an unsightly term. There are legitimate complaints that could be made about Tarantino, no doubt, but there are really interesting things happening throughout his entire body of work, and I wouldn't miss a new film of his for the world. Labels: media commentary |
Sunday, October 12, 2003
1:03 PM
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