Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (8 page)

Natural psychological tendencies aren’t enough to keep society running smoothly, of course. We need rules and we need rules about when to break the rules. Our self-interest and our need for food and shelter manifest themselves as a rule about property. Our natural compassion for others manifests itself as a belief that others shouldn’t be too greedy. Our aversion to violence manifests itself as a prohibition against killing. In these ways we form a code to live by, and we internalize it, using it as a measure not only for others but ourselves as well.

If this is correct, then we should expect the same natural tendencies, and also the development of something like a moral
code wherever human beings would benefit from having one. Surprisingly, this is exactly what we find. In World War I, for example, unofficial truces between Germans and Allies evolved without any explicit negotiating. Both sides understood how to interact to maintain the peace between their trenches, and would sometimes celebrate holidays together.
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We should also find predictable patterns to those rules, and predictable patterns to the psychology of rule breakers—they will do what they can to minimize the damage to their moral identity. When something bad happens, we will try to place the blame elsewhere. When we treat others badly, we try to justify our behavior or place the blame on others. When we seriously harm another human being, we often try to dehumanize that person. On this third view of morality, rules against killing and robbing others emerge out of our human nature and social interactions. Therefore, morality is real, even though there may be no universal, unchanging rules built into the basic structure of our world. Instead, there are psychological facts and social conventions.

I want to use this idea that morality grows out of human nature to think about the moral character of the Reservoir Dogs. The Dogs are violent criminals, but they are human beings, and they behave in exactly the way predicted by this third view of morality. Their motivations are familiar to us, and their excuses and patterns of justification are as well. So while Tarantino knows that he can create tension in his movie by offering cool, attractive, seemingly
amoral
protagonists, in fact he fails to successfully portray an amoral universe. His characters—the Dogs in particular—are not all that different from us. They
can’t
be if the movie is going to be the least bit plausible. They feel moral impulses and pressures, they think morally, they debate moral points, and they have a moral code. They are moral in the same way that we are, and therefore the movie offers some indirect support for this third view of morality that I have mentioned.

Consider the opening scene. There, as the gang finishes breakfast in a diner, Mr. Pink refuses to tip, which begins an extended
debate on the ethics of tipping. If these fellows are such cold-hearted bastards, why do they bother? They could easily walk out of that diner with a look sufficiently cold and hard to convince the manager he ought to pay the entire bill himself. Instead, they all have a sense of the right way to behave, and they try to justify these beliefs in ways that are very familiar. Pink doesn’t simply refuse to tip; he attempts to justify his belief. And his justification is one we can make sense of, even if we disagree with him. He admits that he would leave some money if he thought the waitress
deserved
a tip, but denies the waitress deserves a tip:

Pink is asserting that it is a mistake to treat people the way society expects you to treat them, and that we should instead treat them as they deserve to be treated. I think most people would agree with him about this. The real issue is about whether waitresses
deserve
a tip, and this is precisely what the other Dogs focus upon. Mr. Blonde, the most cold-hearted killer in the bunch, points out that waitresses work hard, and don’t make very much money. Pink responds with a number of relevant points: that waitresses aren’t starving, that most minimum-wage jobs don’t involve tipping, that he doesn’t control tax policy, that waitresses have chosen their job, and that they could always quit. He believes that tipping has no real justification, and besides, it isn’t his fault if someone else chooses a hard, low paying job. The scene is revealing because it shows the characters reasoning with moral concepts, and doing so in familiar ways. Examine the scene carefully, and we find many, many elements of morality: questions about responsibility, the needs of others, whether tipping is an arbitrary custom, and even the character of the sort of person who doesn’t tip.
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Throughout the scene, the gangsters seem very familiar to us. They are using moral concepts, and using them correctly. Mr. Pink doesn’t argue that the waitress doesn’t deserve a tip because he is short. Such a claim wouldn’t make any sense to us, and he knows that, so it wouldn’t succeed in convincing the others and therefore would fail at preserving his moral identity as a reasonable and fair individual. They are all using moral concepts correctly, and, with the possible exception of Pink, they are defending a position that most of us would probably defend. The scene is interesting in part because of the stark contrast between the serious debate about the relatively trivial matter of tipping and the serious business of casual violence that soon follows. There is, no doubt, some disparity between the philosophical debate about tipping and the gangsters’ subsequent bloody behavior. It is a mistake, though, to think that the opening scene is an aberration. In fact, the entire movie is infused with morality, and morality is necessary to make sense of the Dogs’ behavior. It is, I think, an appropriate introduction to the entire movie.

Tipping seems a relatively trivial matter compared to the murders that take place in the movie. Despite all the violence, though, we see familiar patterns of motives and excuses—evidence of the sort of psychological and moral restraints discussed by Hume, Glover and others. Specifically, there is evidence that they have some natural sympathies for others (in the opening scene even Mr. Blonde displays some sympathy for the waitress), and that they do not approve of unrestrained violence. When Blonde goes off and kills the store employees needlessly, Pink and White label him a psychopath. White even shows concern for one of Blonde’s victims, implying she was too young to die.

Of course, the Dogs are willing to use violence, but there are boundaries. Pink states: “I don’t wanna kill anybody. But if I gotta get out that door, and you’re standing in my way, one way of the other, you’re gettin’ outta my way.” We might not agree with Pink’s choice of careers, but it isn’t difficult to understand how he balances self-interest and concern for others. We are more likely to disapprove of Pink’s putting himself in such a situation
in the first place than we are with the principle that innocent people can sometimes be sacrificed. Even Mr. Orange, the undercover police officer, kills an innocent person when she endangers his life.

Blonde, when confronted about his murder spree, attempts to excuse his actions by placing responsibility on the victims. “I told ’em not to touch the alarm. They touched it. I blew ’em full of holes. If they hadn’t done what I told ’em not to do, they’d still be alive.” While we think he is wrong about this, the moral logic is appropriate: if he were a police officer warning someone not to reach into their coat, and the victim were a suspected murderer, then the killing would be excused. His attempt to justify his actions seems to prove that he views the situation in terms of right and wrong and that he has a moral identity he is trying to protect.

When we see others suffering we often invent stories to place the responsibility on those suffering individuals, just as Blonde does with his victims. We distance ourselves from the bad in the world to avoid thinking poorly of ourselves. In this way, we protect our moral identity. When violence becomes necessary and commonplace, we dehumanize those we cause to suffer. During war, soldiers routinely invent dehumanizing slurs to describe their opponents. The Dogs use such dehumanizing strategies on the police: when White casually mentions that he killed “a few cops,” Pink asks, “No real people?” and White responds, “Just cops.”

The Dogs don’t really live by their own code, at least not in the sense that each makes rules for himself. Mr. Pink tries that in the opening scene and is rebuffed. The Dogs are supposed to act like professionals. Repeatedly throughout the movie, they appeal to professionalism to influence and evaluate one another’s behavior. As professionals, they have a plan. Mr. Blonde deviates from the plan in the store, and is criticized. When Pink begins to think that the plan is going to endanger him, he argues that he should deviate from it, claiming very reasonably that: “the plan became null and void once we found out we got a rat in the house.”

A professional avoids unnecessary violence. When discussing Blonde’s murders, White states, “What you’re supposed to do is act like a fuckin’ professional. A psychopath is not a professional. You can’t work with a psychopath, ’cause ya don’t know what those sick assholes are gonna do next.” In this way the code restricts their behavior for the benefit of other gang members.

When violence is necessary, there are still rules. Just as soldiers distinguish combatants from non-combatants, the Dogs distinguish police officers, whom they deem to be legitimate targets, from the protected category of “real people.” Police officers exist to put them out of business, so there is no possibility of rules emerging for the benefit of both parties. On the other hand, if the officers were more interested in money than fighting crime, then a truce would be highly likely. Since that isn’t the case, there is no reason to come to a truce with the police officers, and so their professional code does not extend to cover them. It does cover “real people” but offers them only weak protection. The real value in the code is protecting the gang (the more violence, the more trouble they are likely to encounter) and helping to resolve disputes among themselves. Recall how Pink jumps between White and Blonde, invoking the professional code, as a way of reducing tensions between them.

Just as non-combatants can sometimes be harmed, so can unco-operative store managers. “If you wanna know something and he won’t tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then you tell him his thumb’s next.” Like Blonde, White rationalizes this violence by claiming unco-operative managers deserve what they get: “When you’re dealing with a store like this, they’re insured up the ass. They’re not supposed to give you any resistance whatsoever.” So not only is the manager responsible for any physical harm to his body, the thieves aren’t really harming anyone at all, since the store has insurance.

It is no wonder that we often find fictional gangsters explaining “It’s just business,” or referring to themselves as soldiers. If these fictional characters are to be believable, they need to have some sort of moral identity. Viewing themselves as soldiers and businessmen is one way of doing this. It minimizes the moral distance between their work and other occupations, and gives them a moral frame of reference. But I think it is more than that. We often find real criminals invoking ethical codes, referring to
themselves as soldiers, and trying to excuse their behavior for the same reasons.

Moral themes provide more than dialogue filler throughout the movie. They are, in fact, essential to the plot of the movie. The entire movie turns on Mr. White’s taking responsibility for Mr. Orange and the gang’s desire to learn the identity of the rat. There would be nothing left of the plot if these elements were taken out. The climax, in which White’s loyalty to Orange meets the gang’s desire to get the rat, makes these moral themes explicit. Here we have a debate about the relative moral characters of Orange and Blonde:

White refuses to believe that Orange is the rat: he is loyal to the end, willing to stand by Orange against his long-time friend, and leader of the gang, Joe, despite the evidence accumulating against Orange. This loyalty creates the tension that leads to the climax and resolution of the movie. How does the gang know that Orange is the rat? Orange makes implausible claims about Blonde’s actions because he is unfamiliar with Blonde’s character. Everyone in the gang knows that Blonde is a cold-hearted criminal, but they also know that he was willing to spend time in jail rather than be a rat himself. When Orange claims he shot Blonde because Blonde was going to betray the gang, they don’t believe him. Nice Guy Eddie confronts Orange:

So it’s not only White’s loyalty to Orange that brings the movie to a climax, it is also Nice Guy Eddie’s certain knowledge (and ours as well) of Blonde’s character. He would never betray the gang.