The Hateful Eight Deadly Words

The Power of Ennui and the Scenario/Plot Dichotomy

An early landscape scene in the film. The Hateful Eight (2015) has a number of wide landscape shots in the film, a hallmark of Western epics but also not indicative of the film’s subject matter (The Weinstein Company)

“I Don’t Care What Happens to These People”

The Eight Deadly Words for any work of literature, film or music even really bad theatre that you paid a lot of money for, because the EDW can make someone get up, put down the book/program/popcorn and go stare at paint drying, because that will feel more productive than interacting with characters that you could not give a rat’s ass about.

So The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino’s 8th film [obviously]) is an interesting twist on both that number and trope, working much in the same regard as Reservoir Dogs or Inglorious Basterds in creating a world of distinctly unlikeable but still compelling characters.

I’m positing [this should be obvious] that unlikeable and hated characters are much different from characters you don’t care about. Tarantino likes to operate in this character space with most of the characters he has worked with and created. It also makes some of his movies very weird in retrospect because you don’t like the characters on a second viewing even though you hate the characters. The fact that you feel that strong emotion is important.

But first, the movie about eight hateful characters.

The Hateful Eight for all of its impressive Western epic cinematography (see above for an example) is a very intimate piece, as it turns out. The action takes place in mainly one location, Minnie’s Haberdashery, and it is plotted more like an Agatha Christie mystery rather than the high adventure of Tarantino’s preceding Western, Django Unchained (2013).

There are spoilers ahead obviously[really you should watch the films I write about] but suffice to say all of the titular eight are not very sympathetic. Hangman John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is stated to be the most morally upright character in the film, but routinely abuses his prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) lies frequently throughout the film, obscuring his true nature, and kills someone who is technically innocent at the moment (albeit Warren had a grudge against this character for very good reasons). The rest of the characters are either unabashed racists or murderous conspirators, or both.

So it’s somewhat satisfying when the ending essentially ends with all of them dead or dying. The two characters who are still alive at the end of the film have virtually no chance of surviving given their massive loss of blood in the preceding final act [Tarantino, like Wes Anderson weirdly enough, divides up his film into acts/chapters. In practice, it’s plotted much like a book].

And it’s satisfying to see all of these characters dead or dying, because even though we learned their stories and histories, we as an audience still detested the characters. And detest is a strong emotion, more so than the ennui that kills many movies because “I Don’t Care What Happens to These People.”

Ennui, in a weird way, is a strong emotional response to a piece of media. It is a strong emotional response because it is a lack of response. Film and television, as ‘hot’ media, demand a strong and affirmative response. Any emotion is better than a lack of emotion.

A note: The temperature of media is a popular concept introduced by Marshall McLuhan, who is familiar to you if you studied film theory at my alma mater on anywhere really. (McLuhan was media studies for a brief period in the 60s.)

It is also a recognizable concept if you watch films by David Cronenberg (the film Videodrome is pretty much a horror film based on McLuhan’s social criticism and theory; as Cronenberg was a student of McLuhan’s at the University of Toronto).

To make things easy, McLuhan is essentially a philosopher with all the fame that comes with being a philosopher that contributes to the public discourse. His most famous work is arguably Understanding Media (1964), which introduces the concept of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media existing on a scale, hot requiring very little interaction and cool requiring conscious effort and imagination on our part.

For example, think about the nature of watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix versus reading the novel. The movie has significantly less content than the book and everything on screen is everything in the world of the movie. In the moment, the audience is not allowed to think of what is offscreen because that is not the goal of a film.

Whereas for a novel, you are expected to think about what is happening at the same time, next or before. Your mind is participating in a way that you do not participate in film, you actively seek information and story instead of passively receiving it.

That is the difference between hot and cool in short.

To be fair, many other critics and philosophers, most notably Umberto Eco, have critiqued the scale as too simplistic. I’m inclined to agree, but for the purposes of this essay, the scale is very useful in proving why ennui is the worst possible reaction to film.

So if film is just a passive “beam” of story/information, all studios have to do is get you to buy a ticket and recoup costs.

Well, it’s not that simple because of marketing and criticism.

Sure, film is a ‘hot’ medium, but the advertisements and the film criticism that itself surrounds the film in question are all ‘cool,’ and audiences participate more in that in determining why we want to see a movie. If it can’t be guaranteed that we’ll have emotion other than ennui, we won’t see the movie and that is bad for studio profitability.

Even then, if a film studio was to get audiences in seats with marketing and some sort of propaganda-criticism, it still would be important to create a good film because it is an on/off switch. If audiences collectively decide they do not care about a film, then the formula itself of that film becomes useless for future use.

Plot is different than a scenario.

A plot is a specific plan for a specific film. A scenario is a framework that can be reused in multiple different films. (i.e. heist films, romantic comedies, etc.)

This might be complicated so let me explain through a popular film scenario and an unpopular scenario. Die Hard, which I love desperately so I’m biased here, has the scenario of a single and resourceful person facing off in a closed circle against overwhelming odds. There are a ton of plots you can overlay on that scenario, differences in dialogue, etc. What’s important is that the switch of good/bad that “hot” media triggers stays set.

Compare this to the scenario of the various romantic comedies that have died off in recent years. The scenario looks something like:

1. Guy has meet-cute with girl
2. Guy and girl have diametrically opposite jobs.
3. They still get along
4. Romance progresses despite a few hiccups, mostly comedic
5. Really Bad Misunderstanding, Girl Leaves Guy
6. Romantic Desperation Attack! Girl and Guy get back together, Happily Ever After.

This scenario is recognized and widely mocked nowadays, and there are many films that profit from deconstructing this scenario. But that was only possible because there was a collective decision of ennui.

So when we say, “I don’t care what happens to these people,” we are saying something much more powerful to the film industry in our drive to have a non-emotional response.

Written by Connor Mannion.

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