Listen to the Chick Habit: Feminism, Speech and Sound in ’s 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 (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,

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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-

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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 , 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.

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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). She thus invokes l’écriture féminine—another (evasive) structure of language through which women can authentically “write themselves”. To do so, women must individually reclaim their own bodies—confscated from them by men and “turned into the uncanny stranger on display” —through writing their own bodies (880). Te aforementioned screaming functions in this way, making Julia’s body heard and uncensored. In screaming, the Girls1 “realize … the decensored relationship of woman to her sexuality,” and Cixous attributes the result of this kind of “female writing” to free “the immense resources of the unconscious” (880). By having the girls scream unabashedly and jubilantly at the artifcial representation—a simulation (Semenenko) or confscation (Cixous)—of Julia’s body, Tarantino establishes early in the flm that the female image and the female voice are in resistance to one another, and must be understood as separate realities.

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Tis oral act can further be understood as analogous to the “anti- logos weapon” Cixous also attributes to l’écriture féminine; that, when engaged, allows a woman “to become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system” (880). Cixous writes, “it is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language” (880). When the Girls1 yell at the billboard, they are “scoring their feats”—or more specifcally, Julia’s professional and verbal feats (starting her own record company, DJing popular radio)—orally, while ‘speaking’ a resistance to the (bodily) confines of phallocentric language. It is an act “marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak,” reclaiming woman’s body from the patriarchy that has confscated it from her.

An opposing, or essentialist, argument may suggest that this feature makes Tarantino guilty of reinforcing the woman’s vocal corporealization, such that the woman’s voice is inextricably tied to her body, the sight of her image forcing everything to halt so that it may be paired to her voice. However, if we consider the text as a whole, the subsequent appearances of the billboards continue to suggest a rupture or separation of traditional associations predicated on the phallogocentric symbolic by asserting primacy of the female voices positioned around its larger-than-life representation of a complex reality that is, on one side, Jungle Julia, the super-sexy radio personality, and on the other, “Julia Lucai,” the grade-school bully. Terefore, even though Jungle Julia’s billboard may be read as another case of female objectification—a fetishization of the (silent) female body at the will of the patriarchal symbolic order—the screaming outbursts are indicative of how these women (re) inscribe their own will, (re)claiming their own right as the

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initiators of female sexuality, expression and freedom. As such, as a narrative retardation, the screaming plays an even more important role in changing how we read the female image in relation to the female voice throughout the rest of the film.

Of particular note is that when women speak, the sound of their voices are the dominant sounds; the audible female voice is completely unburdened within and without the diegesis. Both sets of car sequences, as well as the preliminary restaurant sequences in each super segment, are void of a non-diegetic soundtrack. Even the presence of noise—the sources of ambient or atmospheric sounds that support narrative verisimilitude— are at a minimum in order to completely maintain our focus on the foregrounding of female voices. As noted, these sequences provide the overall structure for the flm; they comprise a fair chunk of the narrative, comprising rich examples of women’s mast- ery of language and unthwarted speech. Trough these passages, we are able to glean the most about the characters, coming to understand who these women are, what they do, and the values and behaviours each possess. Since these sequences establish the fundamental connection between the two super segments, serving as narrative refections of one another, their consideration is paramount to how feminist discourses function in Death Proof, even though no narrative hinge-points occur in either.

Te voices of the male characters, on the other hand, are always accompanied by music. It is as if Tarantino is challenging the linguistic authority of men as he uses music to downplay or thwart male speech. Only two instances in the film where a female voice is completely absent from the conversation occur. In the frst super segment at the Chilli Parlour, Dov () and Omar approach the bar to order drinks for their “bitches,”

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Shanna and Julia. Teir chauvinistic dialogue is accompanied by the song “Staggolee” (Pacifc Gas & Electric) as the talk moves quickly from getting the Girls1 drunk to making fun of Mike.

Consider an example of their back and forth contrived mascu- line banality. Dov is explaining to Omar how to ensure the boys are not lef out at the end of this ‘girls night’:

Dov: “…So afer we bring the girls drinks, in fairly rapid order, but not obvious, we order two more rounds of shots.” Omar: “You think they’re gonna fall for that?” Dov: “We’ll be very convincing. Now it’s time to turn up the volume. No more fucking around. We go to Jagger shots.” Omar: “Man, they’re not gonna drink Jagger shots!” Dov: “Dude, s’long as the guy’s buying the booze, fucking bitch’ll drink anything!” (DVD Chapter 6). Te scripted words continue to list of ofensive and obnoxious references that suggest the strangeness and repugnance of Mike, such as “falling out of a time machine,” and referencing BJ and the Bear (Larson 1979–81) to imply Mike is both a trucker and a chimp. This male discourse is featured on the film’s released soundtrack, isolated from its accompanying diegetic music, like the two instances of female dialogue also featured on the audio release. However, unlike the two instances of women’s speech tracks (one of which will be remarked on below), the men’s speech (or Dov’s speech while Omar snickers under his breath) is just that—straight, non-lyrical, spoken words unaware of the resonat- ing power of harmonious verse. Roth’s performance is superb, but the rhythm and cadence of his speech does nothing to suggest a poetic order of communication or a deconstructive presentation

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of language and/or discourse. More accurately, the men present a falsifed mastery over language, as Roth’s words and voice serve as the very confrmation of phallogocentricism that Death Proof seems to challenge every time a woman “writes herself ” through her voice or her body.

Even when no music is playing, local noise seems to obstruct the man’s vocal audibility, as if it were intruding on his speech. An exemplary sequence occurs between Nate and Arlene outside the Chilli Parlour, where the sound of heavy rain distract and almost drown out his whiny drawn-out pleas of “I wanna make out” (DVD Chapter 5). In the “girl talk” sequences in the restau- rants and cars, noise is very much relegated to the background and/or periphery to ensure the primacy of the female audibility and vocal authority. Te sounds of rain in this sequence, on the other hand, are as dominant as the songs that emanate from the jukebox inside the bar. Te particular texture of the rain is audibly distinguishable also, making the words spoken by Nate (already thwarted by Arlene’s quick, sharp wit) compete for primacy.

Compare this audio treatment of rain to a later sequence within this bar segment, when the flm cuts back outside to Julia and her girlfriends sitting on that same porch. An overhead shot of the ground in close-up shows the volume and intensity of the rain as it pours down on the cement; the accompanying sound of rain matches the image, heard just as loudly and as foregrounded as it was in the above-mentioned sequence. Te next shot reframes the rain from a more anterior perspective, only to pan back towards the porch and Julia’s reclining fgure. Of note here is the audible transition of the rain; it serves as the only audible sound initially, but as more of Julia enters the frame, the primacy of the rain recedes into the diegesis. By the time Julia is reframed, the sound

10 Danielle Barr of the rain has lost its aural command, having been relegated to the background as atmospheric texture, similar to the minimal noises that create verisimilitude. As the sequence continues, Julia’s voice takes command as she explains to Mike the duality of her identity. Tis interplay between diegetic sounds unequivocally demonstrates how Death Proof redistributes the primacy of audible sources in order to foreground female speech and challenge the dominant phallocentric cinematic modes of audio-visual presentation.

Trough the flm’s complex soundscape, Tarantino aligns the girls with the music so that although we are not actually hearing a female voice, the music serves to connote her verbal authority, her dominance and control of the diegesis and language, as if the music becomes an extension of her voice. Similar to Silverman’s moves against double diegeticization, Death Proof extends the life of its women beyond the confines of the one or multiple diegesis, infusing them with external referents to film culture and music, such that they exist extra-diegetically through the soundtrack album featuring their dialogue as well as existing beyond the narrative by way of their association with various popular/cult songs from the film.

For instance, there is a musical motif “Baby It’s You”; frst heard fragmented at the end of the driving-screaming sequence, then emanating from the jukebox in the Chilli Parlour, both times sung by Gayle McCormick of the American band Smith, and then tonally re-presented and sung by (as Lee) in a parked car. Te repetition of this song summons unconscious recollections of screaming at Jungle Julia’s billboards and her memorable hair dancing in the frst super segment, and of Lee as she serenades a sleeping Abernathy in the second super

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segment. As such, the temporal and spatial boundaries of these women fade away, enabling them to hold dominion over multiple moments in the film simultaneously. In fact, Lee’s acoustic rendition of the song is included as a special track on the flm’s soundtrack album, extending her voice beyond the narrative on yet another level.

Te female voice becomes aligned with music in Death Proof in another way, to refer once again to the empowering l’écriture féminine, that liberates “the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her” on her terms, freeing the social unconscious (Cixous 878), is the blurred distinction between spoken prose and song. Briefy mentioned above, Tarantino’s dialogue is readily characterized as one of rhythm, rhyming, and even beats that resonates not only in the tempos and beats of his music choices, but in the performance and composition of speech and lyrics as well. Te dialogue in Death Proof takes on a lyrical or melodic quality indicative of poetry and its afective nature. Tis quality appeals to the unconscious mind and elevates the seemingly banal discourse between characters through rhythm and tempo. “Poetry,” explains Cixous, “involves gaining strength through the unconscious” (879). She aligns the unconscious with women’s strength since it “is the place where the repressed manage to survive” and find new meaning, and thus must be activated to rupture phallogocentricism (880). Such instances include the “girl talk” sequences that serve no direct narrative function but create a rich diegetic reality. Cixous writes about the privileged relationship with song inherent in woman’s speech. Te song or lyricism of woman’s speech is “that element which never stops resonating, which…retains the power of moving us” outside our patriarchal confnement and static heteronormative function (881). It grants such instances of speech a new resonance, a

12 Danielle Barr longevity and signifcance that move beyond traditional flmic speech evocations. The use of the word “resonance” extends beyond the literal defnition of hearing the sound of women’s voices in a diferent way (i.e., the sound being deep or full and reverberating in quality) to also suggest a fgurative defnition (i.e., the ability to have different physical and/or emotional evocations, afect). Especially since the majority of dialogue is attributed to female characters, blurring the distinction between speech and song is another way that Tarantino privileges the woman’s voice, and promotes alternative connotations of authority, profciency and efcacy that complicates the male-centric passive consumption of out-dated patriarchal fgurations of the female.

Consider a passage from the first super segment to witness dialogue becoming song: Playing on the bar jukebox is Joe Tex’s “The Love You Save,” indicated diegetically in a close shot and audible in the background as another female character, Pam (Rose McGowan), and Mike engage in a conversation. Mike contributes to the discourse, but it is Pam who dominates the conversation in and through her monologue about attending “kindergarten to high school” with Julia Lucai. The music provides a base for her words that fow so naturally we forget that an actual song is playing in the background. McGowan does an excellent job at delivering Tarantino’s scripted lines with her own unique embodied verve. Her speech has a cadence and rhythm that accords with the music and highlights the strength and lyricism of her voice. Silverman would label the device of Pam’s speech as having a cadence and rhythm that accords with the music, a “sonic vraisemblable”; that is, a level of acoustic harmony and accordance that produces a sense of audible believability and intelligibility (Te Acoustic Mirror 44). We become engaged with McGowan’s voice alone; “we’ve been permeated by it,

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profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it” (Cixous 881). Her speech fts the duration of the song perfectly so that just as she delivers her fnal words, the ending of the song extends her voice; it makes the emotion and strength of her voice carry on, resonating beyond her actual act of enunciation. Te sound of Pam’s voice is followed by diegetic textural noise, not music/song or voice. By pointing to the materiality of the diegesis (i.e., aural apparatus, like the jukebox), we are reminded of our own aural investment in the voice of this woman that has pervaded our unconscious. Tarantino successfully communicates an alternative representa- tion of women by way of the complex redistribution of acoustic elements that simultaneously foreground the female voice, while rupturing the traditional phallocentric referents that subordinate and confne the speech and corporeality of women within the diegesis. Trough the analysis of the interplay between noise, sound, dialogue and music—within and beyond the diegesis —the feminist discourse in and through Death Proof looks to the future of woman’s representations. It suggests alternative evocations of gender, specifcally in what we attribute to sound and image, rather than the static dichotomy of gender binaries that permeate the past and present social consciousness. In the end, the women in Death Proof are empowered women by virtue of commanding the opportunity to speak, themselves, in and through whatever means they choose.

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Works Cited

Anderson, Aaron C. “Stuntman Mike, Simulation, and Sadism in Death Proof.” Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch. Ed. Richard Greene and K. Silem. Mohammad. Chicago: Open Court, 2007. 13–20. Print.

Bordwell, David. “Observations on Film Art: Directors: Tarantino.” Web log post. David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 13 Mar. 2012. .

Cixous, Helene. “Te Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4(1976): 875–93. Chicago Journals. Te University of Chicago Press. Web. 8 Apr. 2012. .

“Critique: Death Proof, A Film by Quentin Tarantino.” Review. Cahiers Du Cinema June 2007: 10–11. Cahiers Du Cinema. Web. 9 Apr. 2012. .

Garner, Ken. “’Would You Like to Hear Some Music?’ Music In- and-out-of-control in the Films of Quentin Tarantino.” Film Music: Critical Approaches. By K. J. Donnelly. : Continuum, 2001. 188–205. Print.

Kuhn, Annette. “Textual Politics.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. By Patricia Erens. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 250–67. Print.

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Semenenko, Aleksei. “Quentin Tarantino’s Milk Shake: On the Problem of Intertext and Genre.” Intertextuality and Inter- semiosis. Ed. Marina Grishakova and Markku Lehtimaki. Tartu: Tartu UP, 2004. 134–49. Print.

Silverman, Kaja. Te Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in - analysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Print.

Silverman, Kaja. “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Patricia Erens. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 309–27. Print.

“Tarantino Bites Back.” Interview by Nick James with Quentin Tarantino. BFI. Feb. 2008. Web. 8 Apr. 2012. .

Death Proof. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Zoe Bell, , Vanessa Ferlito, Rose McGowan, Sydney Poitier, Eli Roth, , Mary Elizabeth Winstead. , 2007. DVD (Director’s Cut).

Wood, Emma. “Is Tarantino Really Feminist?” Rev. of Death Proof. Web log post. The F Word: Contemporary UK Feminism. 10 Nov. 2007. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. .

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