Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (5 page)

Tarantino looks to be the Nietzsche of our day, a genius upstart right out of the gate. But Nietzsche’s ideas have proved resilient and profound beyond anyone’s expectations. Might the same be said of Tarantino 100 years from now? Will his films possess the same artistic influence and philosophical staying power as Nietzsche’s books? Is his art of blood and banter just matinee Kibbles ’n’ Bits
^®
, or is there some philosophical meat to it?

Nietzsche wrote prodigiously even as a child. By the time he was twenty-four he had composed at least nine lengthy autobiographical sketches, numerous historical and philosophical essays, and a staggering count of poems, letters and diaries. While his childhood friends played as a way to escape life’s seriousness, precocious young Friedrich played in order to produce material about which he could later write.
¹⁰
While
The Birth of Tragedy
was his first book-length publication, it was several years in the making and integrated ideas developed in at least
three prior essays (“Greek Music Drama,” “Socrates and Tragedy,” and “The Dionysian Worldview”). Nietzsche himself later wrote the most incisive criticism of this early work and judged it “ponderous,” “image-mad,” and “disdainful of proof.”
¹¹
Yet, Nietzsche’s mature ideas remain thoroughly indebted to its radical insights about art, pessimism and morality, and Nietzsche’s own appraisal of
The Birth of Tragedy
in his last published book reaffirms and reiterates its “decisive innovations,”
¹²
despite the fact that he later rejects all metaphysical responses to pessimism, even the semi-transparent metaphysics he attributed to Greek tragedy.

In a nutshell,
The Birth of Tragedy
employs examples from Greek history and art to argue that all vital artistic inventions are the products of two dialectically opposed powers locked in creative conflict. Nietzsche called these two powers the Dionysian and the Apollonian, after the two Greek Gods that he believed were their most direct artistic embodiments. According to Nietzsche, any noteworthy creative endeavor is essentially an expression of one or the other of these two primordial forces, or a mixture of them both.

The title of Nietzsche’s book derives from his imaginative claim that Hellenic tragedy originated with a Dionysian chorus and developed into an Apollonian dream-like spectacle which preserved and expressed these two natural impulses in a perfectly balanced and historically unique way.
The Birth of Tragedy
was famously described in 1912 as “a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear.”
¹³
But when it was first published in 1872 its general reception was much less appreciative.

Most readers were probably baffled by the book; respected critics were openly hostile towards it. In large measure, this unfavorable reaction was the consequence of Nietzsche’s highly personal and poetic writing style, which disoriented readers accustomed to the rigid scholarly methods of nineteenth-century philology and philosophy. Then again, it also reflected the biting resentment of jealous peers who were antagonized by
Nietzsche’s accelerated advancement in academic circles and his choice to answer that good fortune with a flamboyant criticism of intellectualism instead of a conventional scholarly treatise.
¹⁴
The book sealed his reputation as a speculative eccentric and effectively stalled his career. But with equal decisiveness, it heralded a bright new philosophical light—at least for those who had eyes to see.

Little Q, as Quentin Tarantino’s mother reportedly called him as a child, developed a youthful passion for writing stories and screenplays and for watching movies that was almost as intense as Nietzsche’s creative passion. Quentin spent much of his childhood scripting and staging elaborate games, recitations and plays (including annual Mother’s Day dramas in which he repeatedly, but always apologetically, killed off his mother).
¹⁵
He saw John Boorman’s
Deliverance
when he was only nine years old and it seems to have marked an important milestone in his life; not only was it one of innumerable films he saw as a child, and later as a video-store employee and action-movie aficionado, it solidified in him a lasting appreciation for the emotional power of the cinematic experience, as one of his many biographers has observed: “he loved the visceral effect movies had on him, even when he didn’t understand what was really going on” (Bernard, p. 13).

Reservoir Dogs
famously begins in a restaurant with a bunch of loquacious crooks comically deliberating over the subtext of early Madonna lyrics and the social merits of obligatory tipping. After their meal, the crime boss, his managerial son, and six operatives who make up the unlikely job crew, jauntily approach their cars as the cheery, melodic ’70s hit “Little Green Bag” plays on the radio. The slo-mo shot that ends this amiable
scene, an image of six happy thieves walking together in identical black suits, white shirts and skinny black ties, has become the signature image of the film. But it is the disturbing and incongruent violence that immediately follows this scene that has become the primary trait of Tarantino’s signature style: before the credits have finished rolling, and while the same infectious music is still blaring away, the film abruptly transports us to the bloodsoaked backseat of a getaway car, where one of the eight criminals is now writhing in agony while his partner dispenses maternal comfort from behind the wheel. The rest of the movie (including the musically choreographed torture and threatened immolation of a captive policeman), bleeds out in a rendezvous warehouse amid brutal confrontations, profane accusations, and brilliant back-story digressions.

As with Nietzsche’s unconventional book, Tarantino’s unconventional movie left critics wondering what had hit them—or bit them, as the case may be.

The first question any serious viewer is prompted to ask of
Reservoir Dogs
is what kind of movie
is
this exactly, and why was it such a sensation? A month after the film premiered at Sundance in January of 1992, producer Richard Gladstein described it as “a very, very, very,
very
, violent comedy.” At the time, Tarantino himself described it in much the same way: “It’s a heist film, about a bunch of guys who get together to pull a robbery and everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. . . . It all leads to violence and blood, but it ends up being black, gallows humor.”
¹⁶

Well . . . not exactly. There is, to be sure, plenty of wry humor in
Reservoir Dogs
. And some very funny scenes and dialogue are cleverly juxtaposed to the movie’s raw violence. But is that enough to make the film itself a comedy (even a black, violent comedy)? Think of John Cusack in
Grosse Pointe Blank.
Now there’s a violent comedy. And despite its bloody wall-towall
violence,
that
film isn’t anywhere near as disturbing as
this
film. On the other hand,
Reservoir Dogs
isn’t an action movie either. Nor is it a straightforward crime drama. In fact, the closest we come to seeing anything of the actual crime is a flashback of Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink racing down a crowded sidewalk with three pistolero cops dogging his tail. Ironically, the same moments of unconventional humor and self-parody which render Tarantino’s film oddly but indeterminately comedic, also problematize any attempt to categorize it in other established genres.

One of the more interesting Tarantino conversations I’ve read was one with Robert Zemeckis for the
Los Angeles Times
in which the two filmmakers mused over where
Forrest Gump
and
Pulp Fiction
(which competed against each other in 1994 for the Best Picture Oscar®) should be shelved in a video store:

Tarantino seems here to have a real appreciation for the fact that a question like “where would you shelve it?” isn’t just an amusing exercise, but a way to begin discriminating between token art and the real deal, which captures something of the moral ambiguity and emotional variety true to life itself. As interesting as this discussion is, however, it doesn’t tell us how we should categorize
Reservoir Dogs
.

Even if they didn’t entirely understand it, experienced critics and film enthusiasts who saw
Reservoir Dogs
somewhere along the ’92 festival circuit seemed to appreciate its strange blend of sing-along music, black humor and violent bloodletting, at least on some level. But until the DVD market revived it, the film’s violence almost beat it into cinematic oblivion: when it opened in the U.S. theatrically later in the year, whatever comedy and craft the film could boast was for most viewers overpowered by the film’s paralyzing brutality. Ella Taylor’s October 16th 1992 review for the
LA Weekly
provides us with a representative response. She began with lavish praise for both the film and its novice director, praise that was attuned to the very questions about style and genre that we’re wrestling with:

Taylor said she was pleasantly surprised by the movie’s unpredictable but expertly realized swings in mood and tone. She
accordingly described
Reservoir Dogs
as a romp, “a brave, cocky, enormously self-satisfied adventure in film as manipulation . . . flipping us from laughs to sympathy to horror and back again” (Taylor, p. 42). She was also charmed by the original and compelling characters. But in the end, Taylor strongly criticized the film for its merciless excesses:

While Taylor later reasoned (somewhat unconvincingly) that perhaps what was really at issue in her dispute with Tarantino was not violence
per se
, but artistic style and personal sensibility, she remained infuriated by the torture scene, which she thought masked the horror of real violence by depicting it with a “cool, giggly insouciance” (pp. 47-48).

But like many critics, in condemning Tarantino’s film Taylor relies too little on careful exegesis of the artwork and too much on casual commentary by the artist (much of which—in this case, at least—reveals more about Tarantino’s naïve and forthright pleasure in simple, unguarded conversation than about the workings and meanings of the film itself). Quentin Tarantino, especially in his more substantial and artistic works to date, deals with violence in a much more ambiguous, nuanced, and yes,
philosophical
way than do any of the other gratuitously violent filmmakers with whom Ella Taylor subsequently compares Tarantino in her review.

But disturbing violence and discordant, ultra-black humor weren’t the only issues audiences had with
Reservoir Dogs
. The casual bigotry and unnerving use of racial epithets, and the
sheer volume of profanity and crudity in the dialogue also occasioned considerable shock and awe. In sum, almost
everything
about the film was excessive. “Restraint,” “subtlety,” and “moderation” seemed the only words that
weren’t
in Tarantino’s politically incorrect vocabulary. So, any genuine interpretation of
Reservoir Dogs
must account not merely for the film’s genre-bending nature, but for its strange infatuation with
excess as such
. And thankfully, while Tarantino himself hasn’t offered us much help in this regard, Nietzsche has: what we have in
Reservoir Dogs
is a picture-perfect case of what Nietzsche would call the Dionysian power striving to express itself in a tragic form.