Week 7 – Reservoir Dogs

Introduction Bill: Hi again, welcome to week seven and we are transitioning into what we can I guess can call Hollywood’s version of independent film. We’re examining Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo, so we’ll jump right in, first with Reservoir Dogs. We’re back with Professor Lewis.

The Modern Auteur Bill: One of the keys for this week is charting where auteurism goes after 1980, and that’s really toward independent cinema. A key figure in all of this, of course, is Quentin Tarantino, a person you’re probably very familiar with. Can you talk about how he differs from previous generations of auteurs like Coppola and Scorsese?

Jon: Yeah, but I do want to comment on something you said at the beginning because I do think it’s important is that independence is always a relative thing in Hollywood and I think that we’re talking about Tarantino and the Coen Brothers this week and they shoot moderate budget films for companies that are either are studios or their films are released by studios. Reservoir Dogs is kind of an exception to this, but of course Tarantino is now kind of a household name so the notion of what constitutes what an “independent” film may be has less to do with the real independence from the studios and kind of more to do with the independent spirit or a kind of difference from the blockbuster mainstream. Now to your question about Tarantino, when you look at the first generation of auteurs, so Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, etc, De Palma, you know we’re really talking about university educated, in some cases university film school educated directors. With Tarantino you’re talking about a guy who worked in a film store and just saw everything. You know, I think he even fosters the impression that he’s something of a sort of savant, that he understands nothing in the world except movies. There’s a lot of kind of celebrity making in Tarantino but that said, he’s different because his body of knowledge is that of a kind of film buff.

Bill: Right, and not a film scholar.

Jon: No, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. He has an affection for sort of the B crime film. Reservoir Dogs is a lot like, well Asphalt Jungle is really not a B-film, but it’s clearly the template for Reservoir Dogs. So I think, you know, he has this affection when you get to the Kill Bill films for really grade B, maybe even below grade B, kung-fu movies and he sort of plays with the stereotypes from the movies, but there’s also a kind of uncritical appreciation of these movies. The best example I can give is when Lucas and Coppola had an industry cloud. They sponsored the release of Kagemusha and then ran two Kurosawa samurai films that are indisputably works of genius and Tarantino, when he gets this kind of cloud releases Switchblade Sisters and I think that basically tells you all you need to know.

Tarantino’s Style

Theatricality Bill: So I have a list here of what you might call his filmmaker quirks or his stylistic continuities. So we can maybe run through, I don’t know, most of them?

Jon: Sure.

Bill: Theatricality?

Jon: You know I think one of the most common misapprehension about Tarantino is that he’s an action filmmaker. In some ways he is the least action action filmmaker.

Bill: Very dialogue based.

Jon: Yeah, there’s a saying in Hollywood that “talk is cheap, action is expensive.” So he has to pick and choose when he has an action scene, especially in Reservoir Dogs, because it costs money whereas people talking in a room is kind of cheap. The challenge is, of course, you have to write good dialogue and Tarantino certainly writes great movie dialogue so maybe he fits that template as well. Yeah his films are very talky. Reservoir Dogs is basically shot in a warehouse for almost the entire film, so it’s like a soundstage. You know, it’s the easiest place in the world to shoot and he tends to shoot in a way that isn’t particularly, you know—I’m going to sound critical and I’m not meaning to, but it’s not—you know he’s really just shooting set pieces in full figure. You know when you look at the voiceovers for the stills and the clips, it’s one of those things I point out, it’s like look at how much of this film is set in spaces where we just look at characters as if they’re on stage. And you compare that to the way in which Coppola is theatrical. Coppola’s shots are gorgeously composed. There’s a kind of randomness in formality, especially in Reservoir Dogs, but to his credit, you have to pay attention to the dialogue because there’s nothing else to look at—it’s not that interesting to look at. Maybe later in his career this becomes less the case, somewhat, but think about the opening scene in Inglourious Basterds, you know that interminable interrogation in several languages, with people hiding in the basement, I don’t think they move, I mean do they? You know they don’t even move in the scene. They’re like sitting at a table for like an hour, so that’s very much his kind of style.

Post-Modern Illusion Bill: How about kind of post-modern illusion?

Jon: Yeah I’ve used the term “post-modern” before in this class as well and really it was a movement in the 1980s, an artistic movement in the 1980s that was less something artists followed and more characterized movements of art away from parody and into pastiche. The difference between parody and pastiche is like the difference between Blazing Saddles and Reservoir Dogs. I mean I’m gathering a lot of you all have seen either Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles; these are parodies, in this case, you know, a horror movie or a western. Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs is shooting a crime film, but it’s not a parody of a crime film, it’s not trying to make fun of it, it’s not exploiting for humorous effects the elements, but it’s kind of sort of blankly, just sort of recontextualizing it in a modern context, giving it a hip context, and that’s something you see a lot in movies in the 1980s and 1990s, so he seems right on, there’s a lot of directors doing that.

Bill: And someone like Tarantino has that broad depth of film knowledge of different genres and styles and filmmakers can draw from those different grab bags whenever he wants to without making fun of, in a way like Blazing Saddles or Airplane does.

Jon: Yeah, Airplane is another good example, and those are “parodies” and pastiche is distinct from that.

Bill: Scary Movie is a parody of scary movies.

Jon: Yeah, might as well talk about a contemporary one. And that’s not what Tarantino’s doing. And part of it is he’s taking it and he’s just making it hipper, he’s making it contemporary, he’s taking a genre and he’s just turning it like this and you see a lot of that in the ’80s. The Coen Brothers do that as well. I mean if you look at the way they play with film noir for example, you know the Coen Brothers are taking a genre and they’re just turning it slightly to a side and so it’s a new take, but it’s reverent, unironically reverent to the genre it celebrates. Even Kill Bill, which I think are Tarantino’s least successful films, are still doing the same thing. There’s a kind of reverence, so it’s kind of cool when the girl comes out in the little catholic school uniform with whatever that weapon is called swinging it around, and it’s staged like those silly kung-fu movies.

Bill: Well the kung-fu fight with the breakfast cereal in the kitchen, it’s channeling the spirit of something, but it’s contextualizing it.

Jon: But it’s not making fun of it.

Bill: Right, it’s not making fun of it.

Jon: I’m not saying that Blazing Saddles means that Mel Brooks hates westerns, in fact quite the opposite probably, but he is making fun of the western.

Bill: Right, right different attitudes.

Jon: Yeah, it’s the attitude of the director, yeah.

Street-corner Philosophy Bill: How about street-corner philosophizing?

Jon: Well you know, Pulp Fiction is a better example of this perhaps, you know you have the two hit-men and they’re early. I think it’s actually one of the things about that scene that’s so clever is that they get there and they look at their watches and they’re too early so they have a discussion first about the royales with cheese and then about whether giving a married woman a foot rub is tantamount to adultery. And it’s two guys who aren’t particularly bright who are really earnest about their opinions and it’s like ten minutes, the screen time, and he does this with the Madonna speech that he himself gives in the beginning of Reservoir Dogs so he seems to like this and there’s a scene later on when Martin Scors—not Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, shows I’m too confused, and Steve Buscemi have this argument over the guy bleeding on the floor, what to do about the guy bleeding on the floor and in a way they’re spouting that kind of one is this sort of “gottabe” integrity around thieves and the other guy says no, we were told not to do anything and we have to follow orders because if you don’t follow orders you’re nothing and so even in that scene there’s this sense of guys who are stopping to actually debate things. But a big part of this is that he’s a word guy.

Bill: Right, he’s definitely that: word smith.

Pop Music Bill: How about expressive use of pop music? This is something he picks up somewhere like Scorsese.

Jon: Well yeah, you see I think in the absence in being all that interesting visually, I think and this is my opinion, yeah I don’t even think the new film, Django Unchained is, it’s actually kind of lurid, it’s kind of an ugly film to look at, I don’t think he’s actually particularly interesting visually, so orally is everything, I mean it’s dialogue and music and he tends to play. And again this is kind of the pastiche, I don’t think he’s making fun of these, you know “Stuck in the Middle with You,” I think, I thought when it came out, I think now because I was around when it came out, it’s a really dopey song. It’s just bad, it’s just a bad song, and you know he has like “Jungle Boogie” in Pulp Fiction and stuff just kind of out of the blue, I mean what are these songs doing here? But I don’t think he’s making fun of them, I think he wants you to dig them in a new context. And again there’s that pastiche thing, he’s taking something from one place and he’s putting it in a new context, but he isn’t changing it and he isn’t commenting on it.

Long Take Bill: Good, that’s well put. What about the long take?

Jon: Well yeah, there’s long takes in the long takes. There’s Andrew Dominik who I idolize who I think is the best Amer—well he’s New Zealand, who I think is the best filmmaker in America right now who made The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and then Killing Them Softly which I just thought was such a great film. He has long takes that I thought were gorgeous and the camera lingers and it’s a good thing. Tarantino has long takes because they are interminable speeches and he plays with that, he knows that the speech is too long. That ridiculous conversation scene in the beginning of Inglourious Basterds, it’s just too long, it’s ridiculous, but he keeps it there because that’s the point of it. So his long takes are kind of like, I mean he idolizes Godard and whether he says so or not, there’s just so much of what Godard did in his work. Godard has this one scene in Weekend, a film that from my generation was very important made in 1967 I think, end of the ’60s, and there’s a scene where this guy’s playing a Mozart, not particularly well. He’s playing a Mozart piece on a piano on the back of a flatbed truck and it’s the long pan with him as he does it and then he finishes the song, you know he finishes the number and it’s not a very good performance, and then he starts it again and he goes back the other way and it’s like ten minutes of the movie and it’s just like what? There’s like no point to it. Or he has this traffic jam scene and basically it’s just a camera—

Bill: Oh yeah, yeah the long huge pan— Jon: It’s just this endless tracking shot of a traffic jam and part of it’s funny because you can’t believe we’re still doing this. And I think that’s kind of what Tarantino does with the long take, it’s sort of like we live in a world of these sort of rapidly cut films and Tarantino is just so..

Bill: Self-consciously involved with the long take.

Jon: Yeah, yeah.

Games with Narrative Time and Structure Bill: So two more on this short list: games with narrative time and structure?

Jon: Well I think this is also in the voice overs. Godard has this famous saying, “Every film should have a beginning, middle, and end but not necessarily in that order,” and Tarantino seems to have taken that to heart. So in Reservoir Dogs, you have the robbery gone wrong and the police informant mortally wounded so he’s bleeding basically the whole film, and then you have this flashback, but it’s not like a normal flashback where it takes you back, sets you up, you’re back in the present. The flashback’s as long as the first part of the movie, which shows him going through a series of rehearsals of his commode stories speech. It’s even more apparent in a film like Pulp Fiction, a film I’ve gathered a lot of people watching this have seen where you know Vincent Vega gets killed at the end of this sort of “second act” of the film and suddenly there he is again in the third act. Jackie Brown deliberately shows this same scene three times, it’s an exchange of money. Partially because he tweaks them a little, but really it’s just to annoy you, just because it’s three times the same thing, so he’s sort of playing with narrative time, so we expect time to sort of pass in movies and we expect a linear narrative and Tarantino is not going to give us that.

Violence Bill: The final one, and this is something I’m interested in because I don’t care for a lot of Tarantino’s films because of violence.

Jon: Yeah, yeah. You see I don’t think he’s a very violent director.

Bill: Yeah see I think he’s stylistically violent, which to me is worse than being realistically violent, but talk about violence in this film.

Jon: Okay, well first of all I think we need to leave the new film out because I think Django Unchained and really the Kill Bill films, too are a different category because he’s playing with the spaghetti western in Django and there are all these close ups of spurting blood because there are in that genre and in Kill Bill he’s playing with those sort of B, C, D kung-fu movies and there’s a lot of violence in those, and especially with this sort of samurai thing, but he’s playing with the wrong samurai films from where I sit, he’s not playing with Kurosawa, he’s playing with something else, so there’s a lot of blood in that. But if you look at Reservoir Dogs, really there’s the guy bleeding the entire movie and it happens fairly quickly, it happens in the robbery, and then there’s the whole torture scene, which of course seems, for a lot of people, the only part they remember from the movie. So I don’t actually think it is. You know Pulp Fiction has a male rape in it and it’s got a pretty grizzly boxing scene, a guy gets shot in the face and they make a joke out of it, but there’s also, you know, if you look at the violence per minute, it’s probably less than in a TV show.

Bill: Oh yeah.

Jon: The other thing you said though, so you are more upset by cartoon violence than real violence? Or the other way around?

Bill: Nope, that’s what we said is more—I don’t like the idea of watching stylized—violence that’s been stylized to illicit…

Jon: Be attractive?

Bill: To be attractive or illicit something other than…

Jon: Horror?

Bill: Or revulsion, yeah.

Jon: Yeah, I think this is a real, in a way, a legitimate debate because the MPAA, which rates films, generally is more lenient to cartoon violence, to the kind of violence you would see in… well Star Wars is in a way a very sanitized violence. You don’t see a whole lot of blood, but there’s a lot of beings being killed, I guess “people” is the wrong word. And in superhero movies for sure, you know the body counts are fairly substantial, and the actual violence of people fighting, it’s pretty much the whole darn movie and they tend to give PG-13 to those movies. And then you’ll get a film where there’ll be a brutal act on screen and that will get an R because it’s realistic, it’s a violence that we can identify as something in the real world. I don’t know exactly where I stand with that because I actually think that there’s a third kind of violence, like real life violence. I can’t watch that violence.

Bill: Like documentaries?

Jon: No, I can’t watch another person hit another person.

Bill: Oh like if something that would happen.

Jon: Yeah, if you and the camera man got in a fight right now I wouldn’t want to watch it.

Bill: Yeah, okay, fair enough.

Jon: But I see, I think it’s good for students to think about. Which is the more disturbing: violence that is like Looney-Toon violence or violence that is real? Because you know in a way, violence does exist in the real world and it is hard to watch.

Bill: Right, and as it should be. That’s where my point is at. The reason I don’t have a problem with realistic depictions of violence is because I, and I assume others, more often than not walk away thinking, “God, isn’t violence terrible?” A lot of times when I watch, not all of his films, but many of Tarantino’s films I walk away thinking, “Wasn’t that exciting? Wasn’t that cool? Wasn’t that hip? Wasn’t that all the things he’s trying to reference in doing that?” which I don’t know, I’m coming down on him.

Jon: And there’s nothing hip about violence.

Bill: There’s nothing hip about violence, stay in school kids.

Jon: Well just one last thing, it’s like when you watch a sporting event and somebody gets hurt and the entire sporting event, like American football is built around—

Bill: People getting hurt.

Jon: Okay, organized violence. When somebody gets really hurt, there’s a hush because it’s real violence and to me, I think that’s PG-13 violence, that’s the violence kids should see, violence that is revolting.

Bill: Yeah.

Jon: Whereas violence that’s “fun” and here I can see the argument made that the scene in Reservoir Dogs is too “fun,” you know the torture scene, because he’s dancing around, and he looks kind of cool, oh he’s a “maniac” isn’t that cool? So I can see where you’re coming from, but I do think that there’s this—you know that it’s real violence that is our problem, not screen violence.

Bill: Right, but then again I’m contradicting myself because I love the scene in Fargo with the woodchipper, and that’s played for laughs.

Jon: Yeah, which we’ll get to later.