Feminism, Speech and Sound in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof
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Listen to the Chick Habit: Feminism, Speech and Sound in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof by Danielle Barr It is tempting to misread Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007) as a simple, relatively tame exploitation flm, especially if one is familiar with his earlier, testosterone-motored flms like Reservoir Dogs (1992). Yet this film functions differently, exercising a feminist agenda of sorts that manifests in the redistribution of the primacy of voice, music, sound, and noise, to produce a unique soundscape that foregrounds the female voice. To this effect, Tarantino blurs the distinctions between dialogue and song, between music and noise, efectively presenting an alternative to the way we traditionally hear flm and flm characters. We could argue that Death Proof’s women’s corporeal and aural fgurations challenge Western phallocentric language: they privilege a form of ‘female writing’ of woman and her experiences/desires. Trough rhythmically pleasing orchestrations of female linguistic authority Death Proof ofers a new/diferent/self-defned woman. In so doing, Tarantino disrupts a passive male-centric spectatorship, as he calls attention to the way in which we typically hear female voices, particularly in mainstream cinema. Death Proof is roughly divided into two parts (or super segments) each showcasing two diverse yet convergent groups of women (referred to as the Girls1 and Girls2) and their sadistic stalker, Stuntman Mike. Te Girls1—radio personality Jungle Julia Lucai, 1 Caméra Stylo Shanna and Arlene—casually drive around town and arrive at a bar where they eventually encounter the aging Stuntman Mike. In the second super segment, Te Girls2—Kim, Abernathy, Lee, and Zoë — ‘test drive’ a vintage 1970s Dodge Challenger. Mike follows them and a high-speed car chase ensues. Once the Girls2 turn the tables, Mike finally gets his comeuppance in a slow- motion brutal smack-down of female-instigated bloody violence paired with enhanced sounds of female fst-on-face brutality and cathartic emphatic cursing. With Death Proof as no exception, Tarantino’s films are predicated on sound and image as much, if not more, than the story being told. Heavy on banter, it is female conversation that comprises the crux of the flm. Te flm’s syuzhet progresses through long stretches of pure speech—“squabble and solilo- quizing” (Bordwell)—that retard the narrative trajectory, but add to the richness of the characters. Quantitatively, Tarantino moves towards an alternative cinema that privileges the female voice. Devoting the majority of the flm to women’s dialogue and discussion—typifed in the car and restaurant/bar scenes of both super segments, this female discourse is ofen generalized as “girl talk”. This is highly uncharacteristic because “[w]ithin dominant narrative cinema,” asserts Kaja Silverman, “the male subject enjoys not only specular but linguistic authority. … Te female subject, on the contrary, is associated with unreliable, thwarted, or acquiescent speech” (“Dis-Embodying” 309). Silverman discusses divorcing the female voice from her image through a deconstructive device that challenges female confne- ment, indicative of a practice she calls vocal corporealization. She writes that the female voice cannot be divorced from the body as easily as it can be separated from the male one, since it is associated with some kind of specifcity. Te woman’s voice is less 2 universal due to its specifc texture (characteristically delicate or lilting) and is made more vulnerable as a result. Tis is not the case with Death Proof. Tarantino challenges this vocal corporealization with occasional frame jumps resulting in brief non-synchronic moments. Moreover, even though the Girls’ voices seem to ‘match’ their bodies (Silverman The Acoustic Mirror 46), the language with which the woman speaks is contra- dictory to the “normative” or traditional (re)presentation of a female (or feminine) image. In the mirrored introductory driving sequences, for example, both sets of girls consume roughly fve minutes of flm time with similar dialogue concerning romantic birthday disappointments, sexual escapades, immediate plans about their day and a small doses of the girls ‘ragging’ on each other. Te dialogue is sharp, however, becoming personal or profane. Such emphasis could be interpreted as a distancing device that challenges dominant patriarchal cinema and ofers new ways for women to be heard. At the same time, what makes something or someone decidedly “feminine” or “masculine” is contingent upon the social conventions/confgurations of the individual assessing such traits. In the end, the spectator-text relationship is (re)conditioned by hearing mainly female voices that dominate the duration of the flm. Female expression and experience are thus aforded an expanded realm of privilege that is witnessed and understood by even the most passive spectator. By volume alone, the female voices suggest that the agent of action in Death Proof is female. Each major narrative move is initiated by, or directly contingent upon, women; the forward momentum of the plot depends on the action of any one of the many women inhabiting the diegesis. Te linear progression through the narrative is not only predicated on the female chara- 3 Caméra Stylo cters’ mastery but moreover, on aural authority. Te narrative catalyser is predominantly a woman and/or her voice throughout the flm, other than the brief bridging sequence between the flm’s two super segments, which is driven by Sherif Earl McGraw. Although, Dr. Dakota Block-McGraw complicates the male specular and linguistic authority of this sequence as Earl and his (unnamed) Son must wait to hear her voice to (re)act, to speak. Tus the narrative action must also halt, waiting until these men receive the “verdict” on Stuntman Mike from this woman of authority and intelligence (marked by her status in the medical profession). Te forward movement of the narrative (progression of the fabula) depends on the privileged female speech act, a deconstructive device towards patriarchal dominant cinema. As another move towards approximating a type of counter or feminist cinema, Tarantino takes time at the beginning of the film to suggest a rupture in mastery over women, challenging female vulnerability and the apparent inseparability of their voice and body in and through the act of screaming. Silverman explains woman’s vulnerability and inseparability through acts of vocal corporealization: the confnes of her body as well as her double diegeticization—the refusal for females to exist extra-diegetically- produces a double confnement within a deeper diegetic space (Te Acoustic Mirror 46). For instance, we traditionally hear more verbiage from a woman through a stage performance or some sort of activity that she is involved in within the narrative: her voice contained in the diegesis of the performance contained within the flm’s diegesis. Tarantino subverts this confnement, vulnerability and diminutive position/representation of women by having the Girls’1 scream, uninhibited, every time they pass one of Jungle Julia’s billboards. Narratively, the screams interrupt the fow of the sequence. Julia explains her romantic entanglements to her companions; Shanna halts the conversation to point out the giant 4 Danielle Barr advertisement above. Not until they have fnished screaming does she resume the conversation, as if no interruption had occurred. Tough the sound of screaming and the image of women doing so are conventionally synchronized—voice matching with image seemingly in accordance with Silverman’s vocal corporealization —the screaming is additionally deconstructive in its non- synchronic manner in relation to the momentum of the narrative or fow of the discussion. Large billboards advertising Julia’s morning radio show litter the landscape, with Julia’s body fgured centrally, each playing of diferent themes: the sensually strong ‘jungle queen’ in leopard print and confrontational gaze, accompanied by the written threat “1 dare you not to wake up with me” [sic.] or the intertextual Kill Bill-inspired reference of Julia lounging in a yellow-with-black-stripped jumpsuit under the Kill Bill-style typeface. On another billboard of particular note outside the Texas Chilli Parlour Julia is dressed very much like she is in the narrative, in a tight white t-shirt and short denim shorts. She holds a come-hither gaze as she reclines on a couch covered in records, her hands resting in her lap and her long smooth and naked legs are balanced on the upper edge of the sign, her feet protruding beyond the perimeter of the billboard. Such representations accord with what we have come to expect from a fetishized image of the woman—that is, the silent female body/part put on display by and for men. However, Julia’s most repetitively fetishized features—her legs and/or feet, the object of repeated focus and continually framed as such throughout the frst half of the flmextend beyond the confnes of the billboard, a visual prelude to how the female voice in Death Proof extends beyond the confnes of the narrative, in addition to existing beyond the female body itself by way of music and language-sounds. 5 Caméra Stylo The Girls’1 screaming in unison is a nod to sisterhood, the establishment of female communities and the championing of a successful female radio personality, characteristic of a feminist expression or female writing (Cixous 876, 879; Kune 261). Teir acoustic intervention also suggests subservience—where female speech acts move beyond the confnes of a masculine-defned language. It functions similarly to the “new insurgent writing” Hélène Cixous proposes in her iconoclastic essay Te Laugh of the Medusa, a model of discourse that “will allow [woman] to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (880). Using the term phallogocentrism, Cixous argues that speech is privileged over the written word and that the phallus centres Western language. She writes, “it is impossible to defne a feminine practice of writing … [since] it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system” aiming to theorize or enclose it (883).