Severed and Connected Parts: ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992)
“Look, I understand that you’re nervous, all right? And I wish the warehouse had more visible windows, but it doesn’t. We have to make do with the cards we were dealt.”
That’s from a deleted scene shot for Reservoir Dogs in which Mr. Orange’s fixer, Holdaway (Randy Brooks) — a fellow cop who instructs him on how to get hired for the heist and what to do once it goes down — apologizes for the specifications of the rendezvous warehouse, which contribute to the supreme precariousness of the whole situation. The criminals, of course, will later turn the space’s limitations to their advantage — which is exactly what Quentin Tarantino himself had to do, albeit in a different way, when he made the film before us.
First films require from their directors a guile and creativity that go far beyond matters of artistic taste and choice. Making the most of what you have — those are the terms of the game. And I doubt any director has ever succeeded on those terms better than Tarantino did with Reservoir Dogs.
The claustrophobia of the warehouse gives the film a theatricality, a play-like feel, and it forced Tarantino to tell his story — aside from sporadic flashbacks — in real-time. Not showing the jewelry heist that sets the plot on its way was an act of budgetary restraint that managed to pay artistic dividends. The most fascinating crimes rarely, almost never, provide their primary fascinations in the mechanics of the crime itself, but in the crime’s implications — in the stories of those involved and what comes next, after the deed is done and the larger story must be resolved.
Because of all these circumstances, Reservoir Dogs is by necessity a dialogue-driven movie. This is the most serendipitous thing imaginable — for Tarantino and his movie, and, by extension, for us. Of all his many talents as a filmmaker, dialogue is the one unassailable gift, the one part of the process, he says, that comes unbidden, as if from forces beyond his control.
That’s why I love it so much that the very beginning of Reservoir Dogs — hence, the very beginning of Tarantino’s career as our most distinctive director — is not an image but a sound, and it’s the sound of Tarantino’s own voice, as Mr. Brown, doing what he would soon become so very famous for doing: talking shit about pop culture in a manic, idiosyncratic, colloquial kind of poetry: “Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. The entire song — it’s a metaphor for big dicks.”
And then we’re off, as the gang debates among themselves the merits of this theory. They debate other things, too — famously, they debate the issue of tipping in restaurants — and as they do so, we receive multiple signs, obvious only in retrospect, of who the undercover cop is. (More on this later.) This being a movie rich in Moral Ambiguity, the undercover cop is not the hero of the piece. Nor is Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), as some have suggested. Tarantino has made it clear over the years that there is no intended hero of Reservoir Dogs, and you’d have to work pretty hard to find a theory that defies the logic of this claim. (The closest, I suppose, would be the uniformed cop Marvin Nash, played by Kirk Baltz, who gets his ear cut off and still doesn’t identify Mr. Orange as the rat.)
But even though there is no on-screen hero of Reservoir Dogs, there are plenty of them off-screen, and primary among them is not Mr. White but the man who plays him.
It’s the most L.A. story you’ve ever heard — or, at least, it’s as L.A. as any L.A. story you’ve ever heard.
Tarantino had already quit his job at Video Archives — the rental store where in his apprentice years he famously clerked — and sold a couple screenplays for what, by Hollywood standards, barely qualify as pocket change. (These were From Dusk till Dawn and True Romance; Natural Born Killers would soon sell as well, also for very little money.) But this Reservoir Dogs script he held — he knew this was his ticket for getting a chance to direct. Many people coveted the screenplay for themselves. Monte Hellmann wanted to direct it, and was even willing to help secure funding.
But Tarantino remained insistent that he be the one to direct. He intended to do so in black-and-white, subsidized with nothing but the $30,000 he’d received from selling True Romance. That was the plan until his producing partner, Lawrence Bender, gave it to his acting coach, whose ex-wife, also an acting coach, knew Harvey Keitel from her days at the Actors Studio in New York. “When I read it,” Keitel later said, “I was just very stirred. Quentin had a new way of seeing those ancient themes of camaraderie, trust, betrayal, redemption. I called Lawrence Bender and told him I wanted to help the movie get made.”
Suddenly, Tarantino now had not only a movie starring Harvey Keitel, but a budget of $1.5 million with which to direct it. He used that budget to assemble what may very well be the best-cast movie of all time (traveling to New York on Keitel’s dime for the auditions to do so).
If that’s not L.A. enough for you, check this one out. Before all this, Tarantino had been taking some acting classes of his own, and one of the few gigs he got was as an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls. This makes more sense than it might at first sound; Tarantino had always been an Elvis freak who “walked around dressed like Elvis in the eighties.” (He insists today — and video evidence bears him out — that he was the only impersonator among the nine cast who dressed as “the Sun Records Elvis,” whom Tarantino has always considered the most authentic Elvis.) Because the episode was a two-parter, he got double the residuals, and then more residuals still when the episode was added to a best-of lineup for the series.
“So I got paid maybe — I don’t know — six-hundred and fifty dollars for the episode,” he recalled (emphasis very much his). “But by the time the residuals were over, three years later, I made, like, three-thousand dollars. And that kept me going during our preproduction time trying to get Reservoir Dogs going.”
You really feel like Mr. Orange’s gunshot wound is real. Even for those of us fortunate enough to have never been shot in the stomach, we get the sense that we could maybe, possibly, start to glean what it might feel like, which is more than I can say about most other movie gunshot wounds. This has a lot to do with Roth’s terrific acting, of course — all the kicking and cursing, squirming and spitting, and, not least, the facial contortions. Watch it again and count all the decisions Roth has to make as an actor to convey his agony.
“When somebody gets shot in the stomach that way, they bleed to death,” Tarantino has said, and then, echoing Mr. White in the movie: “It’s the most painful place a person can get shot because, once the stomach is pierced, all the acidic juices are released into your body. It’s a horrible, horrible pain, until you get too numb to feel it.” There was a medic on set to keep the bleeding at realistic levels. Eventually, it got to the point where the medic said, “Okay, one more pint and he’s dead.”
Parenthetically, it’s fun to note that in the Hong Kong movie City on Fire — which inspired Reservoir Dogs, or, according to those who don’t know how art works, was ripped off by Reservoir Dogs — the cop who’s shot in the beginning of the film loses a comically low level of blood, as if Bob Ross had dabbed his shirt with some watercolors.
One Easter egg from the deleted scenes regarding Orange’s injury: White, Mr. Pink, and the boss’s son, Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn), are in Eddie’s car, and White is insisting to Eddie that Orange needs a doctor, not simply the nurse they’ve arranged for. Eddie says he couldn’t get ahold of a doctor, just the nurse, whose name is Bonnie. White isn’t having it; they exchange fuck-yous a few times. Then Eddie says, “You wanna play that? I’m leaving myself very fuckin’ vulnerable with this Bonnie situation, but maybe I’m such a nice guy [I doubt that’s how he got the nickname], I’m willing to do it. But no more. Forget about it. I’m callin’ her back and I’m tellin’ her to forget about it.”
Tarantino may have chosen, similarly, to forget about this scene, but when he came to make his next film, Pulp Fiction (1994), one entire section of the movie would involve a nurse named Bonnie, and, echoing Nice Guy Eddie, that chapter would be titled “The Bonnie Situation.”
There were many who simply couldn’t take the ear-slicing sequence. At least two of these were people you’d presume tolerant of the grotesque: Wes Craven (who walked out of the screening) and Harvey Weinstein (who as producer wanted the sequence cut). I wonder how many of these people (besides Weinstein, of course) knew that the sequence had also been shot from an alternate angle, one that actually shows Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) slicing a prosthetic ear from the officer’s head.
For those who can stomach it, that’s another deleted scene worth checking out. It’s surprisingly realistic-looking. Some would have surely fainted at the sight, while others, just as surely, would have found their suspended disbelief quickly submitting to gravity. It’s surely way over-the-top. Not showing the actual severing of the ear was just as wise as not showing the actual robbery of the jewelry store, and for at least one of the same reasons: to do so would have been to distract the movie from its intentions — which, aside from narrative suspense and humor, include the examination of human behavior at some of its deepest psychological levels.
Reservoir Dogs is wise on so many things, it’s hard to believe it was written by a 27-year-old.
It’s wise on the matter of effective interrogation. After the crooks have tied up Marvin Nash, the uniformed officer Blonde has kidnapped, Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) insists on torturing him for information. Eddie, meanwhile, for reasons that have nothing to do with compassion, isn’t going for it: “If you fuckin’ beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago Fire. Now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!” This predates by about fourteen years the popularization of what is, by far, the soundest argument against torturing suspected terrorists.
It’s wise on the nature of storytelling. When Orange is complaining about the sheaf of narrative he’s supposed to memorize— with which to regale Joe, Eddie, and White to show that he’s on the level — Holdaway tells him, “Look, man, just think about it like it’s a joke, all right? You memorize what’s important; the rest you make your own, all right? You can tell a joke, can’t you?” And:
Now the things you gotta remember are the details. It’s the details that sell your story. This particular story takes place in a men’s room, so you gotta know all the details about the men’s room. You gotta know if they got paper towels or a blower to dry your hands with. You gotta know if the stalls ain’t got no doors or not, man. You gotta know if they got liquid soap or that pink granulated powdered shit they used to use in high school, remember? You gotta know if they got hot water or not. If it stinks. If some nasty, low-life, scum-ridden motherfucker, man, sprayed diarrhea all over one of the bowls. You gotta know every detail there is to know about that commode. So what you gotta do is take aaaall them details, man, and make ’em your own. While you’re doin’ that, you gotta remember that this story is about you, and how you perceive the events that went down.
(By the way, Brooks does a terrific job taking his own character’s advice, as you’ll see if you compare Tarantino’s screenplay to the words Brooks speaks onscreen. Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson actually auditioned for Holdaway and wasn’t offered the part by Tarantino — who’s seen him fit for just about every movie he’s made since — to which one can only say, What the fuck?)
Famously, it’s wise on the matter of tipping in restaurants. When their meal is over, Mr. Pink provides redoubtable reasoning for not throwing in his dollar: “I don’t tip because society says I have to. All right: I’ll tip if somebody really deserves a tip — if they really put forth the effort, I’ll give them something extra. But this tipping automatically is for the birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doing their job.” And: “I used to work minimum-wage, and when I did, I wasn’t lucky enough to have a job society deemed tip-worthy.” And: “[S]ociety says, ‘Don’t tip these guys over here, but tip these guys over here.’ That’s bullshit.”
He’s right, of course — as long as you drop in the proviso that waiters often make less than minimum wage, precisely because restaurant managers know they’ll be receiving tips. In other words, restaurateurs unburden themselves of properly paying their employees, placing that burden on us instead. And why do they get away with it? Because we’re not Mr. Pink — because we let them.
But this sequence also has something to tell us about human nature. Notice the clues it provides to Orange’s status as the undercover cop — the one merely pretending to be a criminal. (It’s worth noting that orange — or saffron — is the color Buddha wore to demonstrate his sympathy with imprisoned criminals.) Although Pink’s tipping theory is met with sharp disagreement from some of the others, it establishes him as a dominant figure in the group, comfortable being belligerent and outspoken in this company — someone, in other words, worth getting close to if you intend to integrate safely into the gang.
That’s exactly what Orange very clearly tries to do here, showing Pink a friendly look of amused agreement during the tipping debate and then, at the end of it, saying, “He’s convinced me. Give me my dollar back,” retrieving it from the pile.
When Eddie says to leave the dollars where they are, Orange petulantly makes a show of throwing his buck back into the pile, giving a recalcitrant tough-guy look that appears more rehearsed than genuine.
Something similar happens later on, in a scene that flashes back to this period before the robbery when Orange is trying to show he’s one of the gang. The guys are in Eddie’s car arguing about who played the cop on that one show. As they try to figure it out, along with Mr. White, Pink and Orange keep interrupting Eddie as he tries to tell the story that took them down this detour in the first place. When Eddie’s frustration reaches a crescendo, Orange looks impishly over at Pink and the two share a comradely chuckle.
Orange is trying to earn Pink’s trust, just as he later earns the trust of White, who comes to feel so intimate with Orange, he tells him his real name. This is not a victory for Orange — who already knew White’s real name, along with practically everything else about him — but very much a catastrophe, as it’s this very fact, that White errantly gave Orange his real name, that makes White skittish about dumping Orange off at the hospital. Orange’s finesse at achieving intimacy, in other words, very literally costs him his life.
If mirrors in movies tend to represent the duality of those who stare into them, the mirrors in Reservoir Dogs are certainly no exception to this tendency. Mr. White is constantly looking into the warehouse-restroom mirror as he tries to piece together how things could have possibly gone so wrong during the robbery. This brings out his empathetic side — his Good Side — as he tries to put himself in the place of all those involved, including the cops and other victims, and opines that only a sociopath would have gone off shooting innocent bystanders the way Mr. Blonde did.
Mr. Orange — who later ends up shooting a civilian in self-defense — stares into a mirror of his own as he tries to go into gangster mode — to summon his Bad Side — shortly before the robbery. Just as White, trying to play his abnormal part, becomes very much a Good Guy (generous and trusting to a fault), Orange, trying to play his own abnormal part, becomes very much a Bad Guy. Both of them, in the end, pay dearly for following through on their pretend roles — for not being true to themselves.
