Quentin Tarantino and How His Reservoir Dogs Helped Change Hollywood by Andrew Lynch

Quentin Tarantino and how his Reservoir Dogs helped change Hollywood By Andrew Lynch

Introduction Quentin Tarantino made his Hollywood debut with the 1992 crime genre, cult classic, Reservoir Dogs. The critical hit film that transformed the video store clerk and writer/director’s career almost overnight, from that of an aspiring indie filmmaker to a Hollywood mainstay. With idiosyncratic, colloquial dialogue, non-linear storytelling methods, and a playful reimagining of genre clichés and conventions, Reservoir Dogs reinvented the crime genre and spawned countless imitations in the process. This essay aims to look at the industry parallels to the New Hollywood movement briefly, how that defiance of creative stagnation was revived during the 90s (with Independent film distributors becoming a template for mainstream subsidiaries), how Reservoir Dogs’ narrative structure broke and tweaked conventions, and the insight we can gain from critical responses at the time along with a breakdown and analysis of the film’s narrative itself. To summarize, an industry perspective, film perspective, and the critics’ perspective will encompass the primary cornerstones of this essay.

A Brief History of the New Hollywood influence Hollywood reached a turning point around the late 1960s with the arrival of New Hollywood cinema, a movement which helped jumpstart a revival of creativity and innovation in Hollywood. Prior to this, Hollywood (and cinema in general) was facing extinction; cinema audience attendance numbers were at an all-time low and film studio productions had become well-oiled machines to a fault, devoid of new ideas and instead played it safe by sticking to rigid formulaic narratives as a financial crutch, a policy which was proving to be a false economy. 1969’s Easy Rider in many ways brought things back from the brink; its focus on character, the American youthful zeitgeist of the time and its drug- fuelled yet soulfully honest tale of the American Dream as an unobtainable non- entity woke up audiences and studios alike. The old guard or rather the studio heads of old Hollywood finally had new blood amongst them and as such the “rigor-mortis-like grip of the generation that invented the movies” (Biskind) was on its way out and their monopoly on the industry and the creative intransigence that came with that would soon be replaced with fresh eyes, a filmic renaissance of sorts.

As the 1980s came to a close, history was beginning to repeat itself to some extent with another bout of creative stagnation in mainstream Hollywood. This time a creative revival was not found from within the mainstream but instead seeped its creative energy from the fringes of the mainstream, in the form of the Independent blockbuster, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989). The distributer behind it was Miramax, a company that was going to burst into the mainstream with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The impact of Miramax and other Indie distributers reverberated throughout mainstream Hollywood with many major studios creating or acquiring their own “indie” styled divisions, such as Paramount Classics and Fox Searchlight, with projects more aligned with the indie film sensibilities of the new-found competition; these were films that essentially favoured character over plot and appealed to niche demographics but made a greater percentage turnover, which Hollywood took notice of (Perren). Thus, creative innovation was on the rise again within the mainstream albeit this time due to an outsider’s influence. With that in mind, in a climate where external forces were now being embraced by Hollywood for inspiration and even appropriation, the stage had been set for a very talented outsider to enter the fray and his name was Quentin Tarantino.

The Path to the Silver Screen Quentin Tarantino started off as a screenwriter in his free time, whilst working as a video store clerk in Manhattan Beach, California. During this time, he wrote True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994) and developed some of his ideas with a work colleague and friend, Roger Avery. His work with Roger Avery included developing the fictional radio station that would feature in Reservoir Dogs ("Quentin Tarantino Bio"). Initially, Tarantino planned to make Reservoir Dogs himself on a shoestring budget of $30,000 but his friend and producer, Lawrence Bender, convinced him to option it so that they could find a backer. Both Tarantino and Bender, envisioned Harvey Keitel as a dream fit for the main part and in a case of dumb luck, Bender was able to get the script passed onto Keitel through his acting class teacher who knew Harvey Keitel. Keitel was impressed with the script and signed on to the project as both lead role and producer, even going so far as to cover their travel costs and putting them up in New York so they could carry out casting auditions there to broaden the potential talent of the film. This resulted in an ensemble piece with iconic actors such as Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, and Lawrence Tierney. It was out of the Sundance Film Festival and their tour of the festival circuit in general that then secured distribution support from Miramax Films, a distributer which Tarantino would come to rely on right up until his fourth film script Kill Bill (written as a single script but split into separate films Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol.2). During the Sundance Film Festival, Reservoir Dogs did not win any awards but it did win over mindshare as the most-talked-about film of the event (Levy).

Critical Response and a Narrative Breakdown/Analysis of Reservoir Dogs While Reservoir Dogs did not make waves in a financial sense, earning almost $3 million domestically and £6.5 million in the UK, it certainly proved to be a critical darling with resounding reviews virtually across the board. While it had its detractors (which we will look at in more detail later), most critics praised its invigorating energy, quirky dialogue, and its welcome upheaval of genre conventions and smart yet subtle play on audience expectations. Some critics brought up its subversion of audience conventions by drawing comparison to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). This comparison stemmed from the deliberate non-linearity of the films narrative, a structure that in less capable hands may come across as illogically disjointed. In Tarantino’s case, this nonlinearity would evolve organically with his second feature, Pulp Fiction (1994) working in multi-story protagonists alongside this (de Vries).

In the case of Reservoir Dogs, the story is a singular one, the story of a jewelry store heist gone wrong and, in a play on audience expectations, a heist film where you never actually see the heist. The story purely focuses on the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the aforementioned heist; the opening scene and character origin flashbacks comprising the ‘before’ segments, introducing us to each of the robbers and key players involved, and the main chronological narrative thread concerned with the aftermath, which begins with one of the robbers, Mr. Orange, crying out as he bleeds excessively from a gunshot wound, in the back of a speeding car, driven by Mr. White. This aftermath serves as the cornerstone of the film’s tension, seeing characters debate explicitly how things went awry and the gradual discovery of what happened each of the robbers afterward. It almost has a theatrical, stage-like quality in that the first act is focused on character relationships and stripped down to a basic three-character setup all largely within a single location, a warehouse that serves as the rendezvous point after the heist. This interplay illustrates the strengths and flaws of each character vividly, such as with Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), the practitioner, asking the right questions such as ‘how did the police appear at crime scene so quickly?’ and ‘is there a rat amongst them?’. Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), more akin to sociopath than psychopath given his sentimental and protective nature over Mr. orange, a man he views as his fallen comrade and brother in arms. Mr. Blonde(Michael Madsen), the full-blown psychopath that caused a point of controversy with his notoriously unsettling torture scene not unlike the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as both saw moviegoers walkout during these (seemingly) ultraviolent sequences (Harti). Mr. Orange is one of the quieter characters, given he’s unconscious and lying in a pool of his own blood for the majority of the film, but once act two develops background characters come into the foreground (sometimes purely in flashback as we learn of their premature demise) and in a truly bombastic fashion.

On the other side of the critical reception, was a loud minority that found the work to be “overly violent, needlessly profane, racist and possibly misogynistic“(de Vries). One of the more interesting and thoughtful critiques of Tarantino’s depiction of violence contends that enjoyment can be derived from it as “a recognition of artifice is a fundamental part of the pleasures offered“(Coulthard), and due to the deliberate use of tonally contrasting music, the audience becomes acutely aware “the framing, artifice, referentiality, and clear parameters of violence” (Coulthard) and as such this deliberate disconnect evoked in the audience empowers them to enjoy the violence to some extent. While I find this argument one of the more thought provoking and intriguing insights instinctively, it can instantly be dismantled when we consider the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. The author discusses it as a point of disconnect, deliberately disarming the audience with its use of music to facilitate their enjoyment of the violence to follow. The author delves into how the music fades out when Mr. Blonde walks outside the warehouse to retrieve the oil can from his car and argues that the music fading out is a means of enforcing the artifice, evoking audience awareness of this artifice, “it also serves as a framing of the violence so that we are reminded of the real world, yet comforted in the assertion of violent action's place outside of that world” (Coulthard). The issue with this argument is that it contends that the music serves as an auditory metaphor for the disconnect between the film world of ultraviolence inside the warehouse and the banality of the outdoor world of the audience expressed as the normal distant sounds of children playing outside. This critic actually contradicts herself however as in an earlier part of their critique they mention how pop music is employed to avoid any pretense of “intellectual engagement” and the films of Tarantino are “persistently superficial…the primary pleasures are those of kinetic energy, excessive style, and the super sounds of a cool sound track“ which nullify any attempts to garner deeper meaning from a fading soundtrack other than the literal logic of the film universe in that moment. In the case of Mr. Blonde having “Stuck in the Middle With You” fade out momentarily as he leaves the warehouse for his car, we can assert that this would be due to the fact that the song itself exists inside of the film universe, playing on a radio inside the warehouse which the character made a point of mentioning in the earlier moments of the notorious torture scene; “Did you ever listen to K-Billy’s Super sounds of the seventies” he asks his would-be victim before proceeding to play said radio station. The artifice exists not just in the violence but even extends to the film’s soundtrack. The in-film radio, a tidbit of tertiary aesthetic information it would seem, actually serves as a narrative justification for such a seemingly random and offbeat choice of music given the gravity of the scene that it accompanies. That is the genius of Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs, every detail, however inconsequential it may appear initially, acts as a cog in a very specific narrative machine or delivery device. After all, God is in the detail.

Conclusion This essay has explored the historical factors that facilitated creators such as Quentin Tarantino, the creative climate he was thus able to disrupt and invigorate with new life and the debut feature that has garnered cult status as an Indie Blockbuster. Reservoir Dogs has been analyzed with reference to first-hand critical reception of the time and reflective papers published since as well as my own assessment of the critiques both then and now which I believe have helped refine my own criticisms of cinema going forward and helped me to refine my own voice both as a critic and creator. The work itself has spawned countless imitations but what is the most important element, to my mind, to learn from a work such as this is that other creators’ passion can be a good source of inspiration and motivation but should never be the bedrock of your own ideas, never a template, merely a jumping off point towards a more refined expression of your own ideas and values.

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