Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds

Home , Death Proof, Death Proof (soundtrack), Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown, Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs

On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish

By Betlem Soler Pardo

On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish: Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds

By Betlem Soler Pardo

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7267-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7267-6 To Rafa and Joan

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... ix

List of Abbreviations ...... x

Acknowledgements ...... xii

Preface ...... xiii José Santaemilia

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One ...... 6 Quentin Tarantino 1.1 The Director’s Life and Cinematographic Background ...... 6 1.2 Film Career ...... 11 1.3 Violence ...... 26 1.4 Homage or Plagiarism? ...... 31

Chapter Two ...... 34 Characterisation of Swearwords 2.1 Taboo and Obscenity ...... 36 2.2 Swearing ...... 47 2.3 Political Correctness ...... 72 2.4 Censorship in the Film Industry ...... 77

Chapter Three ...... 98 Analysis and Results 3.1 Methodology and Materials ...... 98 3.2 Hypotheses ...... 99 3.3 Analysis of the Insults in Quentin Tarantino: An Initial Typology ...... 99 3.4 Case Study: Sex-Related Insults in Quentin Tarantino and their Translation into Spanish ...... 159

viii Table of Contents

Conclusions ...... 193

References ...... 206

Filmography ...... 213

Annexes ...... 218

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Number of insults by category in the seven films Figure 2. Frequency of insults by category in the seven films Figure 3. Total number and frequency of sex-related insults in the seven films Figure 4. Fuck/fucking as the act of copulation, an emphatic intensifier, a general expletive, or an interjection Figure 5. Total number and frequency of excrement/human waste insults in the seven films Figure 6. Total number and frequency of body part insults in the seven films Figure 7. Total number and frequency of religious insults in the seven films Figure 8. Total number and frequency of incest-related insults in the seven films Figure 9. Total number of insults related to prostitution in the seven films Figure 10. Total number of racist insults in the seven films Figure 11. Total number of cross-categorised insults in the seven films Figure 12. Frequency of insults related to physical and mental disability in the seven films Figure 13. Total number of bodily functions related insults in the seven films Figure 14. Total number of animal related insults in the seven films Figure 15. Total number of homophobic insults in the seven films Figure 16. Classification of fuck/fucking Figure 17. Number of times fuck/fucking act as the verb to copulate, as an intensifier, an expletive or an interjection Figure 18. Number of times fuck/fucking are translated into Spanish LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACDVT A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue adj. Adjective adv. Adverb BrE British English c.f Compare with/Consult Ca. Circa CCELD Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary CDEU The Cassell Dictionary of English Usage CODEE The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology DEL A Dictionary of the English Language Dial. Dialect DJ Dictionary of Jargon DP Death Proof EDD English Dialect Dictionary Esp. Especially FR Four Rooms GMAU Garner’s Modern American Usage IB Inglourious Basterds interj. Interjection JB Jackie Brown KB Kill Bill LDCE Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ME Middle English n. noun NHDAE Newbury House Dictionary of American English NPDSUE The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English OD Oxford Dictionary OE Old English OED Oxford English Dictionary OHG Old High German OSEDME Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English PF Pulp Fiction Phv phrasal verb On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish xi

RAE Real Academia de la Lengua Española RD Reservoir Dogs RHHDAS Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang SC Source Culture SL Source Language ST Source Text TC Target Culture TL Target Language TT Target Text UAGGE Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English usu. Usually v. verb

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank all those who have made this book possible since it would never have happened without their help and support. First, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. José Santaemilia Ruiz, who has helped extend my knowledge through his own research, comments and suggestions. Secondly, my biggest thanks go to my parents for encouraging me to work hard and for giving me the most precious gift, education. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Duncan Wheeler, Pilar McGillycuddy and Ray McGillycuddy for their professional support and their unconditional friendship. I am also indebted to the colleagues who have given me their support along the way: Agustín Reyes, Luis S. Villacañas, Gloria Torralba and Eduardo España. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to Mary Savage for helping me with the final editing stage of the book. And last but by no means least, I want to express my wholehearted gratitude to Rafa, for his unconditional support, and because his heartfelt encouragement, understanding and love have helped me to complete this book. I am truly grateful to you for teaching me the importance of being positive.

PREFACE

QUENTIN TARANTINO AND THE F-WORD: TOWARDS THE AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION OF SWEARWORDS

JOSÉ SANTAEMILIA UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA

In its age of maturity, translation needs new, engaging, multidisciplinary topics. This book, entitled On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish: Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds, covers a vast territory ranging from audio-visual translation (AVT) to cinema, and from descriptive translation studies to sex-related language. Under a variety of names—film, screen or multimedia translation— AVT has grown into one of the most active sub-disciplines of translation and interpreting studies; in fact, for Díaz-Cintas (2003: 203) “the translation sub-discipline of this brand new millennium”. And this is so because audiovisual products are everywhere and are closely linked to technology—television, cinema and telephony are expanding their products and diversifying their means of transmission as well as their technological processes. New areas of study can be added to the traditional modalities of dubbing and subtitling, such as accessibility and speech recognition technology. The growing addition of modalities and disciplines is enriching the field of AVT in terms of technical procedures and translating strategies, making it highly challenging in terms of its constraints, popular appeal and ideological implications. New research areas are also surfacing. For five or six decades, since the beginnings of the discipline in the 1950s, AVT scholars have mostly dealt with either linguistic or cultural aspects of AVT texts, or with technical constraints directly related to images, colour, sounds, movement and so on. As the number of publications is growing so rapidly, we run the risk of superfluous, unnecessary repetition of commonalities. We also risk viewing AVT products as a series of translation units that can only be xiv Preface judged as either correct or incorrect, or that involve losses or gains which follow a supposed ideal of accuracy or naturalness. Gambier (2009) mentions a few of the challenges the discipline still needs to address, among which some notable issues are the study of censorship and taboo, cultural appropriation, narrative manipulation, reception and tolerance of dubbing, and all the challenges associated with digital technology. And, especially, AVT increasingly pursues multidisciplinarity in its scope and its approaches, thus inviting new viewpoints from a constellation of disciplines, and forcefully pushing its own disciplinary boundaries further. This book ventures into the thorny territory of insults and swearwords in the films of American director Quentin Tarantino, an enfant terrible of contemporary cinema, and notorious for his use and abuse of four-letter words. In his films—particularly in his first films, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)—he consciously includes swearing as part of his creative baggage. From that moment onwards, with the exception of Jackie Brown (1997) and Death Proof (2007), the more Tarantino has become a mainstream commodity, the more he has avoided bad language, thus perhaps becoming increasingly palatable for the Hollywood studio system. The fact that a filmmaker uses (or abuses) four-letter words much more at the beginning—or at the end, for that matter—of his cinematographic career may well seem irrelevant to many readers and scholars alike; for some, this issue should simply be kept out of academia. They consider phenomena like taboo, interdictions in language, obscenity or popular films to be so marginal that they do not warrant academic attention. In fact, in many an AVT translating project, swearwords are strong candidates for elimination or euphemisation, in what usually constitutes a wider sanitisation strategy that considers any challenge to purity (sexuality, bodily functions, excrements, blasphemies and so on) as too overwhelming and offensive. For many others however, (and the author of this book is a good example), swearwords are an integral part of Tarantino’s artistic project. Whether we like it or not, whether we like his films or have no time for them, we must accept that they are part of his artistic-ideological design. In short, swearwords are as worthy of study as any other linguistic or discursive phenomenon. In this book, Betlem Soler has undertaken a brave endeavour. For a number of years she has patiently seen all of Tarantino’s films and listened (time and again) to the most fleeting expression of swearing. She has carefully documented an extensive list of insults (well over one thousand) On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish xv in the original (English) and the dubbed (Spanish) versions. She has catalogued all these insults and revealed certain recurrent categories that form the basis for linguistic deprecation—to wit, and in decreasing order, sex(uality), excrements, body parts, religion, incest, prostitution, racism and a few others. This patient study has shown that by far the most widely used category is that of sexual insults (and here the f-word reigns supreme). Other swearwords, though not representing human sexuality, do also revolve around it—e.g., body parts, incest, or prostitution. Using sex-related swearwords seems to be one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite ways of expressing a range of emotions—particularly anger, relief, disappointment or censure—and of helping define his characters on the screen. Very few of us can indeed imagine Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction without the abundant, constant use of four-letter words. His later films (Inglourious Basterds in 2009, and Django Unchained in 2012), though, cast a serious doubt on this statement, and perhaps invite a revaluation of how foul or bad language is used in the design of his films. Jay considers that, “sexuality is one of the most tabooed aspects of human existence” (2000: 85); without a doubt, reference to other people’s sex(uality) is one of the most widely used mechanisms to affront, insult or disqualify. As is evident in Tarantino’s films, body parts, sexual organs, sexual deviation or illegitimacy are unlimited sources of insult, derision and moral condemnation. A number of characters in Tarantino’s earliest films are criminals, gangsters, drug-dealers, assassins or corrupted policemen. Sociolinguists like Andersson and Trudgill (1990) or Jay (2000) claim that these groups are likely to swear more than other social groups, and for these characters swearing functions simultaneously as in-group vocabulary, rhetorical device and character identification. Much in the same way as sexual scenes or sexual terminology as used by Spanish novelists Almudena Grandes or Lucía Etxebarria have proved instrumental in the construction of a certain woman-identified, unprejudiced narrative, so Tarantino has used four-letter words to create an atmosphere and construct his characters. A passage chosen at random will serve as an apt illustration:

Mr. White. […] That’s the way I look at it. A choice between doin’ ten years, and takin’ out some stupid motherfucker. What the fuck was Joe thinking? I came this fucking close to taking his ass out myself (Reservoir Dogs 1992).

References to (illicit) sexuality are everywhere (motherfucker, fuck, fucking); in fact, Tarantino shows an impressive record of 658 occurrences of the f-word in his first seven films, though his references are rarely xvi Preface sexual. They are more to do—following McEnery and Xiao 2004—with expressive or rhetorical emphasis. The above extract is part of a conversation between Mr. Pink and Mr. White, talking in the bathroom after the planned robbery was interrupted by the police, and they realise they had been set up. Anger, frustration and fear are just some of the emotions conflated in their use of swearwords. McEnery and Xiao (2004) found the word fuck to be one of the most versatile in the English language, as it is variously used as a general expletive, a personal insult, an emphatic intensifier, an idiom or a metalinguistic device. Their study of the British National Corpus shows that it is primarily used as an emphatic intensifier (55.85% of occurrences)—i.e., its main aim is to add emotional values to the words or phrases it accompanies. The most striking aspect, however, is that the denotative sexual meaning of fuck (to copulate) is rarely used in English (7.16% of cases, as opposed to 92.84% of non-sexual usages). For Fernández (2006: 225), fuck can “express pain and pleasure, hate and love, surprise and annoyance, trouble, confusion or difficulty,” and is considered a taboo word, vulgar, rude and offensive, but nevertheless heard and used practically anywhere. Quentin Tarantino, then, makes a very conscious use of the f-word and its morphological variants. The term is a clear indicator of orality, and though it is very seldom used to describe sexual intercourse, Tarantino’s characters (‘The Wolf’, Mr Pink, Mr Brown, Stuntman Mike, or Jules Winnfield) use it repeatedly to show manliness, toughness, arrogance, criminality and perhaps an overall culture of aggression. In her book, Betlem Soler offers a wealth of information on a very sensitive field of inquiry, involving language use, image and movement, the film industry, popular imagination, sex-related taboos and swearing. As the author herself states, “the power of swearwords in Western societies lies in their prohibition, and since this prohibition still exists, they are still just as powerful” (this volume, p.113). We are, then, in a vast (linguistic) terrain driven by desire and subjected to the ups and downs of morality as well as to societal taboos and individual impulses. For Tarantino the f-word is a rich rhetorical device for the expression of a conglomerate of strong emotions. Offence, indecency, base instincts, inner conflicts, manliness, over-sexualisation, repressed eroticism or moral interdictions, to name just a few of these traits, are inseparable from Tarantino’s ultra-violent pulps. I am aware that this may make some people uncomfortable, which is in fact one of the consequences of the use of swearwords. However, Betlem Soler ventures into this minefield in a reflective, academic manner. She has treated sex-related swearwords On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish xvii seriously, knowing them to be one of the surest indicators of identity and of the representation of a character in film. I must confess to an unreserved complicity in the topics explored and the viewpoints expressed in this book. Since the beginning of this endeavour, a few years ago, when it was an uncertain doctoral project trying to scale the high walls of academia, we felt the analysis of taboo words or topics to be a personal, social and academic necessity. We were not dealing with a merely linguistic or cinematographic exploration but, above all, a profoundly ideological project. This scenario is, needless to say, fraught with dangers, censure and incomprehension. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, teeming with lively ideas, playfulness or creativity. The author has taken this task on board with ease and confidence, with a clear message: swearing exists and—what is more—it is instrumental to the rhetoric of Tarantino’s films. Soler also analyses how this language is translated, concluding that the need to adapt or translate Tarantino’s films for a powerful distribution market obliges dubbing professionals—or perhaps distribution companies themselves—either to omit or to replicate what is felt to be an overwhelming presence of four-letter words in Spanish. If the former tends to produce a sanitised version of the original Tarantino film, the latter gives way to anglicised expressive routines in Spanish that are increasingly difficult to avoid in future film releases. Examples abound. In the first instance, the remark “There’s over four fuckin’ pages of shit here” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) ends up as “Aquí hay más de cuatro páginas” [There are more than four pages here], with all the expletives or swearwords deleted. This is a common dubbing strategy, for reasons of economy, of oral delivery and of downplaying of sexual references. In the second case, “Close the fucking door!” (Four Rooms 1995) is rendered as “¡Fuera del puto coche!’, while “Give me this fuckin’ thing” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) becomes “¡Dame esa puta mierda!”, “Have you lost your fucking mind?” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) turns into “¿Has perdido la puta cabeza?”1, and “the fuckin’ dog” (Reservoir Dogs 1992) is dubbed in Spanish as “el bastardo del perro” [the bastard dog]. The abundance of f-word examples demands swearing routines in Spanish that may be heavily criticised, or sound unnatural. We cannot—and should not—ignore the fact that Quentin Tarantino uses (and abuses) swearwords, particularly the f-word; rather, as an

1 As will be explained later in the book, the Spanish puto/puta, literally prostitute, is frequently used to translate fuck/fucking as it reflects a very similar usage and register in the target language. The literal translation of fuck, joder, can often sound like an unnatural anglicism. xviii Preface exercise in honesty towards both cinema and translation, as well as their consumers, we must document it and analyse the Spanish dubbed (or subtitled) versions. The author of this book does so admirably, in an objective manner, very often suppressing the urgency to correct the mistranslations, or to provide the omitted expressions or more creative translations for certain passages. If the f-word exists in the original culture, it must also exist in the recipient culture. This book aims to accurately document the original forms of swearing in Tarantino, and their (un)translated forms in Spanish. The ultimate objective is not a regulatory one, but rather a practical one: translators and adaptors need finely-tuned analyses of real films, as they are committed to producing the same effects as in the original film, and while this certainly has to do with linguistic accuracy, it is more often to do with aesthetics, culture and ideology. Sex-related swearing, and its translation, offers a window on social attitudes and cultural prejudices across languages. Translation (or adaptation) is a privileged device in creating, shaping, (re)producing and challenging our taboos and interdictions across languages. Translation researchers and scholars will certainly welcome this volume, which is brave, honest and profoundly academic, as it involves a (re)valuation of marginal phenomena in translation studies as well as a study of the sensitive, ideological processes present in Quentin Tarantino’s revolutionary films. All in all, this is a challenging book that invites careful reading and reflection. We are fortunate that in dealing with the topic of swearing and translation, the author has dared to speak its name clearly and loudly.

Bibliography

Andersson, Lars-Gunnar and Peter Trudgill (1990) Bad Language. London: Penguin Books. Díaz Cintas, Jorge (2003) “Audiovisual Translation in the Third Millennium”. In Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers (eds.) Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 192-204. Fernández Dobao, Ana María (2006) “Linguistic and cultural aspects of the translation of swearing: The Spanish version of Pulp Fiction”. Babel 52(3): 222-242. Gambier, Yves (2009) “Challenges in research on audiovisual translation”. In Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko (eds.) Translation Research projects 2. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. 17-25. On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish xix

Jay, Timothy (2000) Why we curse: A neuro-psycho-social theory of speech. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. McEnery, Tony and Zhonghua Xiao (2004) “Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in the BNC”. Language and Literature 13(3): 235-268.

INTRODUCTION

This book sets out to analyse the insults from the seven films directed by the North American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs [RD], Pulp Fiction [PF], Four Rooms [FR], Jackie Brown [JB], Kill Bill (vols. I and II) [KB], Death Proof [DP], and Inglourious Basterds [IB], and how these insults have been translated from English into Spanish. One of the main reasons why I wanted to build a corpus of this nature was to document the dubbing of Tarantino’s work and, using concrete examples, to describe the reality of the translation and provide linguistic material with which to study the most influential translation modality in Spanish society, namely, dubbing. To this end, I built a corpus comprising 1526 insults, arranged in order of appearance, taken from the seven abovementioned films. The corpus consists of 1117 tables displaying the insult in the original English and its translation into Spanish. Given the unfeasibility of including such an extensive corpus in the print version, all the tables are provided in the CD- Rom that comes with this book. The reason for focusing exclusively on the dubbed versions of Tarantino’s films is because this is by far the most common way films are translated in Spain. Audiovisual translation—including dubbing—has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years since it became recognised as an academic discipline, due to the fervent determination among language scholars to establish a theory of translation. Within this theory of translation, much has been written on reaching equivalence between languages, and to achieve this the general conclusion is that studying translation in isolation, without taking into account the socio- cultural context, results in an incomplete translation, as we will see throughout this book. Before going any further, it is important to point out that my intention is not to question or criticise the work of those who have translated and adapted the films analysed here; and although I highlight some particular examples, what I hope to do in this book is to present the problems that can arise in translating a complete cinematic production, not call into question the professionalism of the translators who worked on them. Cinema is one of the most powerful and influential media today, together with television. The huge number of films from the USA 2 Introduction translated into Spanish for screening in Spanish cinemas deserves particular attention. In an analysis of this nature, therefore, the films of Tarantino may offer an interesting opportunity from the social perspective because of the exceptional number of insults they contain. To perform this study I compared the original version of the films with the version dubbed into Spanish. My initial intention was to carry out a comparative analysis of the original scripts in the two languages; however, I soon realised that some of the offensive language in the scripts had been stifled in the Spanish version (some insults did not appear at all and others had been softened). On contacting the scripts’ publishers (Faber and Faber), they assured me that the texts had not been modified or manipulated in any way; nonetheless there were obvious differences so I decided to focus on the dialogues as they were heard on the screen. This process enabled me to identify, beyond any doubt, the number of insults in both English and Spanish in all seven of Tarantino’s films. This book, therefore, is grounded on a corpus of insults classified as follows: (1) sex-related insults; (2) excrement and human waste insults; (3) insults related to parts of the body; (4) religious insults; (5) incest-related insults; (6) insults related to prostitution; (7) racist insults; (8) cross- categorised insults; (9) insults related to physical and mental disability; (10) insults related to bodily functions; (11) animal-related insults; and (12) homophobic insults (Jay, 1992). My analysis revealed the sex-related insults category to be the largest group, which led me to centre the study on this category, with particular attention to one specific word that appeared most frequently in the seven films: fuck and its morphological variants. The language in Tarantino’s films has provided a peculiar and interesting field of study since the first minutes of his debut film were aired in 1992, Reservoir Dogs, due to his relentless use of obscene vocabulary. The opening lines in this film, spoken by Mr Pink and Mr Blue, contain the (offensive) words: (1) dick and dicks; (2) fucked over, and (3) bullshit; in other words, in under two minutes, the director has included, (1) words related to the male pudenda; (2) a sex-related verb; and (3) an animal waste insult. The plethora of material to explore in depth in these dialogues prompted me to conduct research into swearing and swearwords, taking Tarantino’s work as a reference. The three instances presented above are just a small taste of Tarantino’s output: I recorded 15261 insults in the seven films analysed [Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill,

1 Note that there are 1526 insults all together, but that there are 1117 examples in the tables in the appendix since some insults appear more than once. On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish 3

Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds], which I identified, classified and analysed in the preparation for this book. The magnitude of this figure is evidence of Tarantino’s constant use of swearwords, regardless of what his audiences might think, and whether or not they might sometimes prefer not to hear such a steady stream of foul language. Notwithstanding, his popularity has been achieved precisely because he refuses to allow distribution companies to alter his dialogues in any way, or modify the violence of his scenes. This is, therefore, one of the reasons why I believe Tarantino’s films could be of interest to the reader. The book is divided into three chapters: Quentin Tarantino (Chapter 1); Characterisation of Swearwords (Chapter 2); and Analysis and Results (Chapter 3). A book based on the work of Tarantino clearly demands some background on the director’s personal and professional experiences. Chapter 1, Quentin Tarantino, gives an overview of the filmmaker’s life and introduces Tarantino in his various roles as director, executive producer, actor and scriptwriter. An exploration of certain aspects of his personal life is a useful exercise since I consider that his heavy use of swearing on screen may be due to experiences in his childhood and adolescence. This chapter also examines the concepts and style that define his films: the genres of exploitation/blaxploitation, the (spaghetti) western, hard-boiled and film noir that have had such a major influence in his work. This first chapter therefore offers a summary of Tarantino’s film career, both the films he has directed (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms Jackie Brown, Kill Bill vols. I and II, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds) and, although not in such great depth, others for which he wrote the script (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk Till Dawn and Sin City). The following section examines areas such as violence in his work and the controversial question of the authenticity of his films. Tarantino, raised under the influence of a series of violent films, soaked up their brutality in his childhood and adolescence and has attempted to transfer them to his own oeuvre. As a result many of the characters in his films have a propensity to swear, since Tarantino has assigned them certain common characteristics that may determine their excessive use of obscene language. This style has provoked negative comments from film critics who consider his work to be over-influenced by extreme levels of violence. Chapter 2, Characterisation of Swearwords, explores issues such as taboos and obscene language in relation to insults in particular. The aim of this section is to identify and study subjects that are considered taboo: (1) 4 Introduction sex; (2) death; (3) bodily functions and parts of the body; (4) emotions; (5) racism; and (6) religion. This brief introduction to taboos and obscenity is followed by a look at the approaches various scholars have taken in their analyses of insults; I explore in turn the work of Ashley Montagu, Timothy Jay, Edwin Battistella, Tony McEnery, and Keith Allan and Kate Burridge. In this chapter I deal with the reasons—social, linguistic or psychological—why we use bad language, and our attempts to avoid its usage. The third section introduces the topic of political correctness and examines euphemisms and dysphemisms. I considered it important to mention politically correct language in this chapter since the cinema industry, as mass entertainment, follows, and is therefore subject to, the norms of political correctness. This section is illustrated with a discussion on euphemisms and dysphemisms. The final section of this chapter covers the culture of the USA and its (self)censorship, and Spanish culture and its (self)censorship, and the implications of using insults in the mass media; the section concludes with a discussion on censorship in Tarantino’s films, some of which— Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers for example— were refused licences to appear on video for long periods in the United Kingdom, although they were all eventually released after a few years. Swearwords are used to hurt the feelings of the person to whom they are addressed, to express certain emotions, and to gain acceptance in a particular group. However it goes without saying that although insults and bad language are subject to taboos and censorship, on certain occasions they are also used as terms of endearment between friends and family. In Chapter 3 I turn to the methodology used in the research and the hypotheses that emerged from the first part of the study, together with the analysis of the results. One of the hypotheses raised in the study is that insults tend to be eliminated when they are dubbed into Spanish. In section 3.3, Analysis of the Insults in Quentin Tarantino: An Initial Typology, I investigate the insults related to the following categories: (1) sex; (2) excrement and human waste; (3) body parts; (4) religion; (5) incest; (6) prostitution; (7) racism; (8) cross-categorised insults; (9) physical and mental disability; (10) bodily functions; (11) animals; and (12) homophobia. In section 3.4, Case Study: Sex-Related Insults in Quentin Tarantino and their Translation into Spanish, I discuss the most frequently used insult in the corpus, fuck/fucking, and examine the various ways it is translated into Spanish. The reason for this inquiry was to determine whether the number of insults was lower in the translated version. This analysis might also provide significant insights into Spanish On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish 5 culture and further our understanding of Spanish society, all of which is essential to any understanding of how a language works. To conclude this introduction, it is important to highlight that the translation of an audiovisual text presents more linguistic transfer difficulties than a literary text, not only because of the linguistic problems that can arise, but also due to non-linguistic constraints. Likewise, it must be stressed that analysis of obscene or foul language is just as important as any other academic or cultural aspect, since it furthers our understanding of the social environment in which it has developed and evolved.

CHAPTER ONE

QUENTIN TARANTINO

In the following section, I describe aspects of Tarantino’s life and the cinematographic trends and genres on which he has based his work, such as exploitation, blaxploitation, western, spaghetti-western, hard-boiled and film noir. I refer to his film career and filmography, focusing on the seven films on which my research is based [Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill vols. I and II, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds], and briefly mention four of the most highly acclaimed films that he worked on in the capacity of scriptwriter (True Romance, Natural Born Killers), co-scriptwriter and actor (From Dusk Till Dawn) or guest director (Sin City). I explore aspects of his work as an independent filmmaker, cult movie director, and global icon, and also highlight the distinction between commercial director and cult movie filmmaker. This section ends by questioning the violence in his films, and the issue of plagiarism that has pursued him throughout his career. I introduce the reader to Tarantino with a brief biography of his life. I deemed it appropriate to look at some aspects of his private life because I believe the origins of his use of swearing on screen can be traced back to his childhood and adolescence, as I shall highlight in the next section.

1.1 The Director’s Life and Cinematographic Background

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee (USA) on the 27th March, 1963. He was named after a character in the American television western drama Gunsmoke directed by Norman MacDonnell whose star, Quint Asper, was one of his mother’s favourite actors. Quentin was brought up in South Bay, Los Angeles, where he lived for nearly twenty years in a mixed black and white neighbourhood. Here, he was exposed to a variety of cinema genres and popular culture since exploitation, blaxploitation, or (spaghetti) western films were among the most popular forms of entertainment with adolescent cinema-goers at that time. Whether coincidence or otherwise, these are some of the genres that Tarantino draws on in his films, which supports the hypothesis that the Quentin Tarantino 7 filmmaker’s early life had a strong influence on his cinematographic career. He inherited his passion for cinema from his mother, Connie McHugh (later Tarantino), a half Cherokee, half Irish young single mother, who used to take him to the cinema to watch adult films when he was just a young boy. His mother’s life had a huge influence on the young Tarantino; at the age of 16 she married a musician called Tony Tarantino, and soon became pregnant with her only child, Quentin, although the couple separated not long after. A few years later, Connie married another musician, Curt Zastoupil, and moved to Los Angeles where Tarantino would spend his teens under the paternal figure of his step-father. He found it difficult to concentrate in class and also had dyslexia; as a result Quentin left school at the age of 17 to become a self-taught student who combined watching films and TV programmes with reading comics. Soon after leaving school, he took up performance classes in Toluca Lake and started to write scripts (Clarkson, 1996). Living with a teenage working mother meant that the young Quentin’s childhood and adolescence was far from normal. His mother was absent most of the time due to long shifts at the hospital, where she worked as a nurse. Tarantino was looked after by a friend of his mother’s, another teenager called Jackie, who made no attempt to control what films or TV programmes he was watching. In addition, his mother used to take him to see a wide range of films in the cinema, regardless of the age certificate. At an early age, he was therefore used to seeing all types of verbal and physical abuse, which, it seems, he reproduces in his own work: films based on memories from his early years. For instance, the central plots of many exploitation B-movies used eroticism and violence as a criticism of society, and their main characters were gangsters, policemen, and femmes fatales. Some popular variations of exploitation films were the “girl-in- prison” films or those with a prostitute in the leading role. Because their main themes revolved around crime and drugs, exploitation films typically used objectionable language, a factor that appeals to Tarantino, as seen in his tendency to include scandalous levels of swearing and cursing in his films. Out of exploitation movies came blaxploitation inspired by the Black Power movement (Comas, 2005), which I now explore. Blaxploitation films reverse traditional black and white roles: the black characters are the “good guys” and the whites are the “bad guys”. Few blaxploitation movies arrived to Spain, perhaps because the Spanish audience did not identify with the black actors in starring roles (Comas, 2005). However, because Tarantino had both white and black friends, it was a natural step for him to explore blaxploitation since he could fully 8 Chapter One identify with the plot. Belton (1994) refers to this genre as “inexpensively made exploitation films pitched primarily to middle-and lower-class urban blacks” (1994: 292). He also describes the concept as follows:

Though blaxploitation films were often merely the reworking and recasting of traditionally white stories, plot situations, and character types for black audiences with black actors, many of them nonetheless addressed the concerns of the black community in ways which were unprecedented on the American screen (Belton, 1994: 292).

This film genre was controversial, and members of the black community and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested against the roles black people were given, such as outlaws, criminals, pimps or drug dealers (Belton, 1994: 294). These roles necessarily called for the use of obscene language. Corral (2005) notes that the adolescent Tarantino’s obsession with exploitation and blaxploitation films, B-movies or low budget films subsequently exerted a strong influence on his own filmmaking which involved elements of crime and much dark humour. While working in a video club, Video Archives, he would recommend customers the films that had most influenced him: blaxploitation films, B-movies, spaghetti-westerns, Italian horror or the Samurai and martial arts films, genres that he would later examine in his own films. Another genre Tarantino explores, the western, had connections with nature; as Belton (1994: 217) points out: “in these films the chief conflict lies between culture and nature” and focuses on “the hero’s struggle for survival in a natural landscape”1. Belton (1994: 206) also defines some of the main characteristics of the western genre as, (1) country and western music; (2) jeans; (3) fast food; (4) Marlboro cigarettes; (5) people who abandon civilisation for a wild life in a caravan; and (6) an iconic car like a Mustang or a Thunderbird2. Contact with nature or the wilderness, far away from civilisation and social and moral conventions, meant that taboo words were used indiscriminately to recreate the atmosphere. This idea caught Tarantino’s attention and he later brought it to the screen in Kill Bill (vols. I and II), and Death Proof. A close relation of the western is the spaghetti-western, a sub-genre also known as the italo-western or eurowestern, which consists of low- budget films produced by European companies. These films typically

1 This is evident in Tarantino’s fifth film, Kill Bill vol.II, when Uma Thurman tries to escape from the wilderness of the desert. 2 Such as ‘the Pussy Wagon’ in Kill Bill, presented to ridicule its owner. Quentin Tarantino 9 involve a dirty aesthetic and tough, hard amoral characters. Italo-westerns were sometimes collaborations with Spanish companies. Examples of spaghetti-westerns are the Sergio Leone films shot in Andalusia and starring a young Clint Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars (1964); For a Few Dollars More (1965); The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) (Comas, 2005). Tarantino seems to be influenced by Italian gore and other Italian directors such as George Romero, John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper. The figure of Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the French nouvelle vague, also played an important role in Tarantino’s film career, to the point that the name of his production company, A Band a Part, was borrowed from Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. In such films, swearing had a constant presence as it helped to determine the masculinity of their characters and define the figure of the macho. Another significant genre, hard-boiled, originated in the 1930s and was inspired by American hard-boiled novels or crime novels (pulps) by authors such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy or Raymond Chandler, all later taken to the screen. According to Belton (1994), these films “feature a proletarian tough guy who lives on the fringe of the criminal world” (Belton, 1994: 194). The sleuths in this genre contrasted sharply with the traditional detective; they are not heroes but anti-heroes. Typical of this genre is the way realism takes over from fiction, which gave rise to great expectations. In the words of Belton (1994), hard-boiled films

introduce a new tradition of realism to the genre of detective fiction. This ‘realism’ is characterized by a revolutionary shift in both the class and the technique of the detective, the milieu in which the detective works, and the language which he or she speaks (Belton, 1994: 194).

As a film spectator, Tarantino was therefore greatly influenced by crime magazines (pulps), Japanese TV series, spaghetti-westerns and the world of drugs from his youth in Los Angeles, which he combined with new ideas of his own. Violence in the streets and obscene language were commonplace in Los Angeles, and as he tried to reproduce scenes from the films he had watched in cinemas, he blended them with situations he invented:

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I’m attracted to this genre [samurai movies, Yakuza movies, spaghetti Westerns] and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn’t quite what I’m seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I’ve never seen before (Lathan, 2003). 10 Chapter One

Examples of this are found in Jackie Brown, where the main character, Jackie, and her counterpart, the bondsman Max, live on the margins of society. The two roles in the film are a criminal and a (retired) detective. The concept of film noir also holds an interest for Tarantino as it offers ample scope for violence, shootings, crime, etc., with their inevitable range of colourful vocabulary. He is influenced by crime films based on novels3, neo-noir and westerns: the eternal dichotomy of good and evil. Although noir comes from the French for black, the phenomenon originated in Hollywood. The vast majority of directors who experimented with film noir were American born or brought up in America, and included Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer (all born outside the US), and Orson Welles, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis and Anthony Mann. Film noir began to appear in 1944 and in general its films were adaptations of novels by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, among others. According to Belton (1994: 184), the film noir period only ran from the 1940s to the early 1950s, and was not initially classified as a genre; Belton (1994: 192) explains that, “film noir has been transformed from an aesthetic movement into a genre”. The features of film noir are summarised by Raymond Burde and Etienne Chaumeton in their Panorama du film noir américain (1993) as follows: (1) there is always a crime; (2) it is filmed from the perspective of the criminals not the police; (3) the point of view is turned around— policemen are corrupt; (4) friendship or loyalty is not to be relied upon; (5) the femme fatale: a woman is responsible for the terrible fate of a good man; (6) savage violence; and finally (7) middle class killers: WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Belton (1994: 188) adds to this list (8) loneliness and isolation of the individual; (9) absurdity and pointless existence; and (10) paranoia as a result of the previous factors. The role of the femme fatale in a film noir is especially noteworthy; she uses sex to get what she wants, she is intelligent, attractive, narcissistic and promiscuous. In the case of Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Death Proof or Inglourious Basterds, Belton’s definition is fitting: “women in film noir tend to be characterised as femmes fatales, intent on castrating or otherwise destroying the male hero” (Belton, 1994: 199). This role is played by Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; Pam Grier in Jackie Brown; Jordan Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito or Zoë Bell, for example, in Death Proof; and Diane Krüger in Inglourious Basterds. This implies that:

3 This emerged out of a literary genre which appeared at the end of the 19th century in Europe (e.g., Sherlock Homes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) (Comas, 2005).