Quentin Tarantino: A Preface

With links, so you can filter through all the movie jargon…

Quentin Tarantino is a polarizing figure to say the least. The anti-Hollywood auteur has released eight films throughout his career, each an antithesis to the formulaic, high-concept, glossy tent-poles favored by Hollywood. He’s an “art for arts sake” type of guy whose aesthetic drills down on the underbelly of cinematic history — 1960s and 70s’ B-Movies.

Tarantino’s small, but influential canon includes: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015) — a hodgepodge of heist films, Blaxploitation, martial arts, Grindhouse, Nazi-sploitation, spaghetti westerns and revenge films. Tarantino’s affinity for pastiche serves up cinephile porn to film geeks who come into the theater seeking to spot as many Easter Eggs as possible. However, while some viewers are inundated with cultural artifacts, allusions and references that relate back to cinematic history and popular culture, the casual movie-goer is left in the dark. Tarantino’s signature low grade special effects (think every blood squirting, head exploding kill scene), surreal plot lines (slave joining a bounty hunter to save his girl from the most notorious plantation in the South, seriously?), and excessive violence go over the head of these laymen who “don’t get” that what they’re witnessing is a glorious homage to characters, scenes and styles that they’ve never, and probably won’t ever, see on film. Their visceral misreadings of the Tarantino Cinematic Universe are particularly frustrating to cluster of Tarantino Stan Club, of which I am a proud card-carrying member.

In a separate post, I unpack the meaning behind the Lincoln Letter in Tarantino’s most recent spaghetti western send-up The Hateful Eight. However, I can’t even mention this man without acknowledging that for the most part, my opinion of his work stands counter to that of most socially conscious black people.

Many of these good folks find Tarantino offensive for his excessive use of the “N-word” or simply because King Spike doesn’t like him. In an article for Salon, writer Eric Deggans explains that many of these Black critics “suspect he has tapped powerful black actors such as Sam Jackson, Pam Grier and Ving Rhames to indulge his n-word fantasies, validating his excursions even as they play sordid characters: weapons dealers, drug mules, hitmen and drug kingpins,” Deggans writes. “They worry his considerable skill as a filmmaker is somehow being used to profit by degrading black people in the guise of spotlighting them, like a white grocer who profits by peddling week-old produce in a black neighborhood with no other stores.” However, I chalk up the offense to a mixture of compulsory adherence to respectability politics, general distaste for the aesthetic and a lack of understanding of exactly who Tarantino is and what he’s trying to achieve on the reels.

I can agree with my conscious counterparts, however, on the fact that there is something very unsettling about Tarantino’s handling of Black culture in his films nevertheless. While they may say that he’s grossly infatuated with exploiting Black people, I feel that this accusation is easily explained away with the understanding that he’s channeling Blaxploitation films intentionally in a lot of his movies (Django and Jackie Brown being the most blatant homages). However, the uneasiness strikes again when you have to sit down and ask yourself “why?” again. Why is he so infatuated with Blaxploitation in the first place? Why does he choose to create Black mandingo characters that resemble the Black Buck trope? Why did he want to write a slave revenge fantasy in the first place? Why did his character in Pulp Fiction need to be dropping all those N-bombs? Why does he choose to focus on a genre that already reads as ugly and offensive?

The answer is somewhere between what his antagonists charge and the brief beautiful moments in which he spazzes out on an obscure Black history topic that you wouldn’t necessarily think a pale white man, or most people for that matter, should know. Consider the scene in Django Unchained where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character goes on a rant about phrenology (the branch of pseudo-science used to justify white supremacy), or the fact that Channing Tatum’s character “Jody” in The Hateful Eight alludes to military cadences that were stolen from Black folklore, or when you realize that Minnie’s Haberdashery is an allusion to Minnie Mink a free Canadian black woman who was kidnapped rapped and sold into slavery. With this knowledge, his interest in the culture seems to become more genuine, than cursory, if you’re one of the individuals who will spend the time to connect the dots.

Haunted with the “why’s” I’ve recently come to a conclusion that, interestingly enough has been hiding in plain sight. Working from the understanding of Tarantino as a provocateur, infatuated with all things “dark” (for lack of a better word), anything lascivious, salacious, bloody, offensive, stomach-turning or generally low brow, will get the most attention from him because it is grotesque …and what is a more enigmatic, taboo, or horrendous topic than the trials and tribulations of the Black experience in America?

In what follows, I write about Tarantino somewhat sympathetically. However, I want a few things to make clear: 1. I’m aware of the criticisms of his work. I’ve had my fair share of discussions in which I’ve attempted to defend his fetish-like obsession with Black people as part and parcel of his overall love and appreciation for us…and it didn’t go over very well, I’ve learned from those mistakes 2. I do not intend to over-intellectualize art. We’re all free to interpret his work in whichever way we see fit. However, art is inherently political and I offer my interpretation of the Lincoln Letter as the necessary tangible evidence to scaffold my case in favor of the renown filmmaker as an advocate… or so I hope.