Royale with Cheese: Quentin Tarantino’s Impact on American Cinema
Quentin Tarantino is simultaneously lauded as both an industry legend and cult-cinema hero. As a recipient of Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes, he has worked with some of the greatest actors from any era or genre you would care to mention. Not bad for a high school dropout from Knoxville, Tennessee, who spent the better part of his young-adulthood working at an L.A. video store. When asked about the secret of his success, the director’s reply was to talk of his obsession for filmmaking: ‘If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one’. Tarantino’s love affair with cinema has characterised his career, which is a miscellany of genres, styles and inspirations from around the globe.
The director has had an undeniable effect on the nature of American cinema. Bursting onto the scene at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with the heist-gone-wrong-so-cut-off-a-cops-ear thriller Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino made a name for himself and earned the attention of Hollywood bigwigs. What the film lacked in budget, it made up for in intelligence and style, and set a precedent for Tarantino’s future work. Two years later Tarantino delivered what many believe to be his magnum opus: Pulp Fiction. In the film, Tarantino uses the formula from Reservoir Dogs, taking a stellar ensemble cast, a brilliant soundtrack, and the coupling of Seinfeld-esque realistic dialogue with a larger than life storyline.
Both films pushed the boundaries of filmmaking at the time, by showcasing a very realistic American underworld, while challenging the consensus on the use of violence, drugs and expletives (particularly the ‘N word’) in cinema. Additionally, Tarantino’s use of non-linear narratives, abnormal camera placement (including pioneering the ‘car boot-cam’), and sullen anti-heroes lent him a place amongst the great neo-noir directors of the twentieth century.
In 1997 the release of Jackie Brown marked an important development in the director’s career. Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch, Jackie Brown was an ode to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, complete with Bobby Womack accompanied title sequence and genre veteran Pam Grier. The film dealt frankly with race in America (“Is white guilt supposed to make me forget that I run a business?”), and allowed Tarantino to embrace his love of forgotten genres, a feature that would come to define his work.
In Tarantino’s films, the use of genre serves dual purposes. On one level it satisfies his need, as the planet’s preeminent movie geek, to pay homage to the directors that he loves. The two-volume epic Kill Bill, described by Tarantino as a “bad-ass chick revenge movie”, was a tribute to the foreign genres he loves. The first volume, a tribute to Japanese Chanbara and Yakuza films made popular by directors such as Kinji Fukasaku, recontextualized many elements from the genre. The film’s premise and lead character ‘The Bride’ (a co-creation of Uma Thurman and Tarantino), was heavily influenced by Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood, in which a woman seeks revenge for the murder of her family. Stylistically, Volume 1 borrows its ultra-violent fight scenes from Samurai films like Shogun Assassin (which is actually features in the second volume) and the blood-drenched Sanjuro. The Bride’s famous black-and-yellow jumpsuit is a replica of Brue Lee’s in Game of Death. The second volume was decidedly different in style. Formed as a Spaghetti Western, Tarantino drew from directors such as Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah, and featured music by master of the genre Ennio Morricone. Volume 2 incorporated the desert heat mirage shot made famous by Once Upon a Time in the West and directly appropriated the double layered “revenge vision” from Death Rides a Horse.
Secondly, the exaggerated use of classic genres allows Tarantino to deal with topics that are deemed too serious for conventional filmmaking, as will become apparent when Django Unchained is released at the end of the year. The idea is that by framing the film as a Spaghetti Western (or a “Southern” as the director phrases it), he can make a movie that deals with America’s shameful history of slavery in a way that is accessible to the audience. This is a similar approach take by Tarantino towards the Holocaust in 2009’s Inglorious Basterds. Modeled as a traditional World War Two “men on a mission” film in the vein of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone, the film is more accurately a Jewish revenge fantasy that rewrites the Third Reich for the better.
The question is: how is Tarantino able to appropriate elements from foreign cinema and make them feel so quintessentially American?
There are certainly themes that hold universal appeal in all of his films. The ideas of greed, redemption and revenge appear more often in a Tarantino movie than Samuel L. Jackson. The same can be said of the reoccurrence of strong female characters such as Jackie Brown, The Bride, or Shosanna Dreyfus.
A more poetic explanation is that Tarantino’s films reflect a cultural diversity that is thoroughly ingrained in contemporary America. Foreign migrants shaped the United States, contributing considerably to its diverse and extensive popular culture, with some of the nation’s greatest artist, writers and filmmakers coming from foreign descent. By adopting styles from pop culture from around the world, Tarantino is embracing the very thing that makes America great. As Jane Mills, from the Australian Film, Television & Radio School puts it, “The Tarantino Legacy gives globalisation a good name”.
In a wider sense, Tarantino has proven to the world that American cinema is just as smart and daring as any other, and that not all Hollywood filmmakers have to sacrifice their eccentricity to get bums in seats. Tarantino is willing to take more risks than most filmmakers, and has avoided being toned down by the industry. Who else would dare threaten Bruce Willis with gimp-suited sodomy?
A champion of 35mm film and double-feature theaters, and a pioneer of the ‘boot-cam’ and non-linear narrative, Tarantino is both guardian of old Hollywood and the vanguard of progressive cinema.
By recontextualizing valued genres with his own distinctive touch, Tarantino creates a universe that is simultaneously realistic and completely fantastical. It is a universe where all wrongs can be righted, and anything is possible. It is a universe in which Hitler is assassinated, slaves get their revenge, and anyone can take a samurai sword on a plane.
Originally published at www.theamerigo.com on October 11, 2012.
