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.