Trolling the Outrage Culture
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, has been accused by some of lacking morals. They’re wrong.
CNN — and then the internet — changed the way we consume pop culture, politics, news, celebrities and art. In a 24-hour news cycle, it is all consumed, analyzed, regurgitated, all before being reanalyzed and reconsidered. Lest they all starve — the thinkers, the writers, the talking heads and the entities for which they spew are in a constant state of flux, and when they aren’t busy producing think pieces about, say, a work of art, they are analyzing and reanalyzing themselves in the face of said art. And lest we all starve — we consumers of information and opinion, the enthusiastic typists of message boards and social media statuses, angry Tweeters who want our voices, our opinions heard too — we wouldn’t change it for the world, even if we could.
The Hateful Eight is a grenade in this dawning information age because Tarantino completely understands American culture and consumption. He knows full well there will be scores of think pieces breaking down all that is “problematic” about his latest (and greatest?) film. It’s as if he is standing up and saying, “In case y’all forgot, I’m a fucking provocateur!”
While Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained continued the tradition of the famed writer-director producing incendiary material, much of that was drowned out by boffo box office and audience catharsis. Tarantino carved out heroes we could love and obvious villains everyone could get behind killing and killing good. Even if someone did feel uncomfortable with some of the material, goddamn it was great to see those Nazi’s eat lead!
At the start of The Hateful Eight, it seems we could fall in love with Kurt Russell’s John Ruth or Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren the same way we did Aldo Raine, Dr. King Shultz and Django. But before long John Ruth is revealed to be an unbearable bully. Not just in the way he seems to enjoy knocking out his prisoner Daisy Domergue’s teeth, but also the way he walks into the room and pounds his chest in front of every other potential alpha-male in Minnie’s Haberdashery. In the cathartic movie sense, we react to these acts of violence on Daisy with the same humor we often cling to when we witness something horrific and are unsure how to react at all exactly. We are shocked by Ruth’s savage response, even if a part of us may think “she had it coming”. But it becomes clear that Ruth, an otherwise seemingly ethical man, has a very real darkness to him. If he acts righteous, it is because he lives by a moral code that allows him to act in terrible ways. He enjoys telling the company he keeps that he takes his bounties alive and lets the hangman do his job. That’s his version of righteous justice, but we come to wonder if he only keeps his bounties alive so that he may brutalize them. John Ruth is dangerous because it is very tempting to view him as the absolute moral authority among these rogues; his speechifying advertises the sort of moral compass we are accustomed to unearthing in such a role. But Tarantino buries him.
Although no one comes closer to being that compass than Major Marquis Warren. For a good chunk of the film’s running time, we latch onto Warren. Partly because Samuel L. Jackson is so good and charismatic in the role, and partly because Warren seems like the shepherd who may have to strike down the rest of these evil doers with great vengeance and furious anger. But if you’re lucky enough to have caught the film in 70mm glory, you learn just how despicable a human being Warren is before he grins and the film cuts to black for intermission.
Without any sort of moral compass character, the audience is left only with these hateful characters and their actions, and these actions are not easily digested. The Hateful Eight is not an easy film to digest let alone regurgitate and reanalyze. Yet it will be, and many will initially focus on all the wrong things.
Tarantino’s characters’ flagrant use of the “N” word, the way Daisy Domergue is treated and depicted, especially as she is the only woman in the film, the over-the-top depictions of violence — all are softballs for the purveyors of information to type up pieces alluding to the filmmaker’s racism, sexism and nihilism (Of course, these will remain allusions. Rarely will anyone with any sort of reputation — at least one that matters to the consumers of stuff like this — come out and call him racist or sexist. Because in this world in flux, such hard statements are bound to come back even to those who write in the invisible ink that is the blogosphere). Tarantino is trolling so hard that he couldn’t be more obvious than if he added an Ennio Morriconian riff of “Nanny Nanny Boo Boo”.
I don’t want to get bogged down in the racism and sexism discussion because it’s an oft-argued and well-argued one from both sides. I will simply say this: One of the things Tarantino brings to the table is this world of colorful characters. Many of these colorful characters are terrible people who speak in terrible ways and do terrible things and I’ve always enjoyed his films in large part because of these characters. I love to hate them, shake my head at them, laugh at them. I love to love them despite their faults, even if those faults are kind of terrible. I can love a character while not condoning that character. Because I’m a fucking adult.
I do, however, want to dig in a little about the accusations that this film is purely nihilist because I could not enjoy this film to the degree I did if I felt the movie was completely lacking of any moral code. Dr. King Shultz is one of my very favorite Tarantino creations in part due to his seething hatred for everything Calvin Candie is (and stands for). So it is not an indictment on Tarantino’s prior two films when I say that I did not need a character compass to point me in the direction of this filmmaker’s intentions in his latest film. In fact, it’s what I admire about the film so much. To me, it’s all up there on the screen in that last chapter which is staged and delivered with such precision and expertise that I’m tempted to argue that this dark and often ugly film is among the filmmaker’s best.
There’s a wiliness to many of Tarantino’s efforts that I believe throws a lot of people off kilter. In Django Unchained the tone shifts fluidly from the serious, terrible depictions of slavery to exploitative, grindhouse-influenced acts of vengeance to a Blazing Saddles-like sequence of historical villains. It’s a masterful performance by the director. The Hateful Eight is a curious beast in that the bulk of individual moments of violence are explicitly exploitative, while the whole is meant to satisfy both our blood thirst and our thoughtfulness. This is a filmmaker with little interest in repeating himself. Yes, here again he tackles racism, but does not grant us any safe harbor. We have no heroes, only villains. We’re stuck with this miserable selection to fend for ourselves, left only with our own sense of morality. I’d argue, however, Tarantino ultimately tips his hand in the end.
This is a great American film reflective of our past and present while also managing to wrangle a glimmer of hope for the future — albeit by way of a lynching. If the most awful and hateful of us can find some measure of common ground among those whom we most despise, perhaps there is hope for the rest of us. Is this the message of a nihilist? It is not pessimism to argue that if only we can sift through all the bullshit meant to divide us, confuse us, tempt us to hate “the other”, even if those may be but small steps in dying moments, our actions may echo a progressive legacy.
To be fair, another valid interpretation of this final act is more cynical; that common ground is possible so long as there is someone else we agree to hate more than each other. Yet I’d argue this, however deranged, is still progress. Among this wild bunch, that counts for something. Civilizations were started on such simple, dark concepts. And if we pay closer attention to the film’s conclusion, before the final act of violence is perpetrated, a decision to kill one of the Hateful Eight did not preclude killing another. And yet, that other’s life is saved. For the moment.
When he last tackled race relations, the discussion, the hot takes in our outrage-friendly culture focused mainly on the depiction of violence and what some deemed appropriate or inappropriate use of the “N” word. Here Tarantino is shoving those hot takes right back into the opinion makers’ mouths, force feeding them until they run out of synonyms for “problematic”.
No question, The Hateful Eight is a tough film. This is the Quentin of Reservoir Dogs set against a pulpy, post-Civil War, metaphor-heavy landscape filled with mean men and women with ugly, black hearts. And yet it ends with a reading of a blood-soaked letter that becomes an ideal if not a wish, in the same way Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained were (talk about meta). Some audiences may feel betrayed in the way John Ruth feels betrayed. But the letter, like those films, is a fantasy meant to disarm strangers, to make mythic heroes where there aren’t really any. We’re more comfortable when there’s a hero — when there’s a letter to make us feel safe. That is the brutal, subtle truth of The Hateful Eight. It has no real intention of disarming itself. As cultural mirrors go, it’s challenging stuff. But to accuse this film of pure nihilism is to fall for the okey-doke. React first, think later. This film is banking on it.
Follow me on Twitter.
