Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (3 page)

The question of whether it’s reasonable to believe a miracle has occurred will be the question of whether it is reasonable to believe that an event has been caused by a divine being that is contrary to what is really a law of nature, not to what is just thought to be such a law. Even if Vincent and Jules agree on the definition of a miracle, they do not agree on whether what
happened to them was a miracle. Vincent thinks it was just a “freak occurrence.” Jules thinks it was a miracle, but does not seem interested in addressing the question of whether it is
reasonable to believe
that it was or was not. In the restaurant he says to Vincent,

Jules thinks he has had a religious experience, and he is not interested in judging what happened on its “merit,” that is, on the evidence. So the discussion in
Pulp Fiction
of the nature of a miracle, and whether it can be reasonable to believe one has occurred, is brief and insufficient to justify some view about the nature of miracles and whether a belief in them can be reasonable. For instance, it does not seem that a miracle must be caused by God. Couldn’t the Devil, if he exists, do something evil that violates a law of nature (such as make a roof tile fall off and kill a person who walks below), and wouldn’t that be a miracle? And, contra Hume (at least when evidence is restricted to testimony), could it ever be rational to believe that a miracle has occurred, and so rational for someone in Jules’s position to believe that their not getting shot was a miracle? Or is Vincent justified in thinking they were just lucky not to be shot?
Pulp Fiction
raises these questions but does nothing to answer them.

The other interesting philosophical question it raises concerns what it is to have a morality, even if it is not a sound or correct one. Vincent seems to have a morality, one that prizes loyalty and that contains a view of punishment that permits throwing someone off a fourth-floor balcony because he has massaged your wife’s feet and killing someone who has keyed your car.

There are various views about what it is for a person to have a morality, and on all of them Vincent has one. John Stuart Mill said the following about wrongness:

More recently Allan Gibbard has modified Mill’s account and come up with the following account of blameworthiness:

For Gibbard, to say a person does wrong is, roughly, to say he would be to blame for doing the action if he did not have a legitimate excuse stemming from his psychological state. So, for instance, because of my grief I may be blameless in speaking rudely to someone who has offered condolences for my loss, even though what I did was wrong because it would be rational for me to feel guilty, and for others to be angry with me, for having spoken rudely if I were in a normal state of mind (p. 44). Not only grief, but ignorance, anger, depression, extreme hunger, or extreme fatigue can sometimes excuse. In general, it is sometimes thought that compulsion and some types of ignorance are what can excuse.

Gibbard’s account of wrongness differs from Mill’s in that he thinks that it does not follow that we think an act wrong if we think legal sanctions should be imposed on its performance. His example involves illegal parking where we might think a fine should be imposed, but we needn’t think such parking is morally wrong (p. 41).

Suppose that to have a morality is to be disposed to make moral judgments, that is, to make moral judgments if the appropriate circumstances arise. Then on Gibbard’s account of morality, Vincent will have a morality just in case he is disposed to judge that the person who performs some act should feel guilty, and others should be angry with him, if that person acts in a certain way, say, massaging someone’s feet without her husband’s permission or keying someone’s car, and he has no excuse
stemming from his state of mind. Though Vincent never explicitly says anything that implies certain people should feel guilty and others should be angry with them for what they have done, his endorsing his boss’s throwing someone off the balcony and the killing of people who key other people’s cars strongly suggests that he would judge that certain agents should feel guilty about, and others be angry with, what they have done. So, on the Mill-Gibbard account of judgments of moral wrongness, it is reasonable to think that Vincent has a morality since it is reasonable to think he is disposed to make what, on those accounts, are moral judgments.

There is another important account of what it is to make a moral judgment, and derivatively, of what it is to have a morality. R.M. Hare was a well-known twentieth-century philosopher who argued that moral judgments are universal prescriptions. They are universal because we must judge exactly similar cases in the same way. If I judge some action good or obligatory because it has certain features, say, it involves keeping a promise and helps relieve terrible suffering, then I must judge any act just like that in the same way. But non-moral, descriptive judgments also have this feature. If I judge some object to be a cube or red, then I must judge any object just like those to be a cube and red. When I judge that someone ought to do something, however, I am recommending its performance, and committing myself to condemning its non-performance and to my acting that way in similar circumstances. In short, I am not attributing a property to an action when I say it ought to be done, but prescribing its performance. Similarly, when I say some action is wrong I am not describing it, but proscribing its performance, or prescribing its non-performance. Because morality requires us to prescribe similarly in
all
similar cases, Hare calls his view
universal
prescriptivism. So on this view moral judgments are universal prescriptions.

On Hare’s account of the nature of moral judgments, Vincent makes moral judgments. Surely, Vincent would condemn anyone who massaged the feet of another man’s wife without that man’s permission and anyone who keyed someone else’s car, not just the particular man who massaged the feet of his boss’s wife nor the one who keyed Vincent’s car. So when Vincent judges that what those particular men did was wrong, on Hare’s view he is making moral judgments. Again, to have a morality
is to be disposed to make moral judgments. So given Hare’s account of moral judgments, Vincent has a morality. So on both Hare’s and the Mill-Gibbard accounts of moral judgments, it seems that Vincent makes moral judgments and has a morality.

There’s a third approach to what it is to make a moral judgment exemplified in the writings of David Hume. Hume writes:

For Hume, a person makes a moral judgment if and only if that person judges from an impartial standpoint on the basis of sentiments that he
expects
everyone to share. We do not have enough evidence in
Pulp Fiction
to tell whether Vincent adopts the relevant impartial standpoint, but his arguing with his friend Jules about whether his boss should have thrown someone off a balcony at least shows that he “expresses sentiments in which he
expects
. . . his audience to concur with him.”

Still, even if Vincent has a morality, it does not follow that it is a sound or correct one. Whether it is would require a good argument for some account of what a sound or correct morality is and an application of that account to Vincent’s own morality. No such argument, or even discussion of what makes a morality sound or correct, is to be found in any of Tarantino’s films. So while his films raise interesting philosophical questions about what it is to have a morality, and a correct one, and what the nature of a miracle is, and whether it is possible for us to ever rationally believe one has occurred, they do not actually discuss these issues in any depth.

Like most fictional films, Tarantino’s at most raise philosophical questions and so can do a useful job, even if they do not provide support for any philosophical position.

AARON C. ANDERSON

 

 

 

Quentin Tarantino’s
Death Proof
(2007): four female characters, four cruel deaths, four short sequences. Several rapid close-ups of the girls rocking out to a radio song, a quick point-of-view shot from the front seat of the girls’s car. Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) pulls his headlights on. Slow motion as the vehicles collide. Slow motion as the bodies of Mike’s victims tear apart in repeated collisions of metal, rubber, bone, flesh. In an instant, the human body forcibly joins with technology and pleasure fuses with pain.

Death Proof
hinges on its two major car crash sequences. The first crash, repeated four times, marks a distinct shift in genre, setting, and cast. You could easily argue that
Death Proof
fuses two very different films, the first part of the film being largely a horror movie and the last part an action movie. Tarantino frontloads the structure of this film with combinations of horror with action, reality with fiction, pleasure with pain, and references with nonreferences.

The U.S. theatrical cut of
Death Proof
opens with a disclaimer from “The Management”: “The following film may contain one or more missing film REELS. Sorry for the inconvenience.” From the beginning, with this sort-of-comical warning, Tarantino draws attention to his film’s status
as a film
, as a constructed work of fiction, and as a “simulation.” Nowhere is this film’s status as a fictional piece more obvious than in the countless references to other films that Tarantino plugs into
Death Proof
. Ultimately, however, Tarantino really references himself and his mental film library while constantly
drawing attention to what the French theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “hyperreality.”

In
Death Proof
’s case, hyperreality is sometimes an unclear mixture of images with reality and sometimes an unclear mixture of images with each other. For example, Tarantino continually references his influences, such as
Vanishing Point
(1971) and
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
(1974), both in dialogue and in image. These references to 1970s action flicks go on to become more “authentic” than Tarantino’s “original” work in
Death Proof
. Tarantino uses the camera to interpret and moderate reality, but at the same time, he uses it erase history by reducing it to movie and TV references.

From the opening stroll through Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier)’s apartment (a character whose alliterative name throws back to
Vanishing Point
’s disk jockey Super Soul) to the pursuit of the “fuck-me-swingin’-balls-out” white 1970 Dodge Challenger (also of
Vanishing Point
fame), Tarantino’s characters constantly explore images, simulations of cinematic history, and simulations of these simulations. In
Death Proof
, references and images become a form of “simulation” that somehow makes the “real” more “real” or authentic. Through the mixing of human bodies with machines and, by extension, the mixing of pleasure with pain, Tarantino repeatedly emphasizes the fact that simulation is at work in
Death Proof
. By combining human bodies with machines, Tarantino opens the door to the combination of the real with the artificial or simulated.

Death Proof
, in many ways, is an attempt to rewrite cinematic history. Tarantino largely does away with the more grand “history” of Baudrillard. For instance, while the posters for
Death Proof
as well as Robert Rodriguez’s
Planet Terror
(the other half of
Grindhouse
, the two-in-one “double feature” of which
Death Proof
is the second part) might throw back to the exploitation posters covering the grindhouses of Times Square in the 1960s and 1970s, the contents of
Death Proof
and
Planet Terror
are stripped of all traces of the historic and economic eras that produced the films that they reference. Tarantino seems to be the first to do away with this larger history as he freely mixes cell phones and text messaging,
markers of the present, with pristine muscle cars, markers of the past.

The multi-million dollar collaboration of
Grindhouse
quickly erases the actual economic structure that dictated the tiny budgets of much grindhouse fare (although depending on your understanding of “exploitation cinema,” you could still define Tarantino and Rodriguez as “exploiters” of their own niche markets). Similarly, in the contemporary production of
Death Proof
there is no space for the quickly disappearing open-road speed-freak freedom of the early 1970s that you find in
Vanishing Point
. The original historical and cinematic context can’t help but be lost.