Quentin Tarantino a "sick fuck?" Why?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve seen this opinion noised about, most famously by James Lileks in one (or more) of his Bleats, but most recently (I think) in this thread. I’d like for someone to explain it to me, as I’m honestly curious. I gather it’s at least partially due to the fact that there’s some pretty ugly stuff in some of his movies (the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs, the hospital rape scene in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, etc.) but I’m at a loss to understand why this makes him “a sick fuck.”

Personally (and I’m aware this is often the case,) I think the man is an inspired, highly original, and stylized filmmaker. I was awed by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I just recently sat through both Kill Bills and loved every minute of them. The densely-packed references had me crowing every thirty seconds. “Leone!” “Morricone!” “Kurosawa!” I had a ball.

Now, since these movies came out, I’ve heard the “Tarantino’s sick” crowd get louder and more insistent. This confuses me. Is it not enough to know that almost every single scene in both of those movies were stylistically taken from something else? The disturbing/ugly scenes were in there because they strongly affected Tarantino and his style, and he wanted to put them in the movies pretty much as-is. This pretty well includes everything, from Buck the Fuck, to the fountains of blood in the House of Blue Leaves, to the scalping of O-Ren Ishii.

Now, generally, find referential movies, music, and art pretty boring. But Kill Bill was done in such an original way, and with so many visual, camera, auditory, and other references packed so closely together that it was rather like watching a virtuoso guitar player riffing on old standards. Normally, I’d find the material monotonous, but damn, he’s good.

I digress. He can be pretty gritty, yes, but I have never thought it was over-the-top. I’ve always thought most of the stuff advanced the story pretty well.

So. Anyone? Explain?

2

I don’t see where it comes from either.

Aside: that’s the second repulsive celebrity in that thread that I’ve often been likened to. Wicked.

3

They said the same thing about Hitchcock. Some people just can’t disassociate the artist from his art.

4

Including Cthulhu? :slight_smile:

5

Well it’s just my own personal opinion. Not a very popular one.

But the way he presents violence as entertainment bothers me.

In your typical Scwarzenegger / Bruce Willis / Steven Seagal popcorn action flick, violence that is waaaay over the top can be entertaining, because it’s clearly hollywood unreal.

But Tarantino takes very realistic graphic gratuitous violence that in other movies may be treated as serious and disturbing and emotionally affecting, but instead he treats it like it’s a joke and should be considered as silly as Schwarzenegger movies.

I disagree. I think his sensibilities are skewed way off into a zone that is sickening, and it makes me ill.

On top of that, I don’t like his undeserved popularity. But that’s another rant altogether.

6

Well, apparently people in his time thought Lovecraft was deranged.

7

And that makes it better?

Can you cite a specific example of what you’re talking about from one of his movies? I can’t think of a single scene that could be described like that.

8

In Pulp Fiction there’s a bump in the road and they accidentally shoot a guy in the head and splash blood over themselves, and they treat it like a minor problem and start having a scene that’s clearly meant as comical.

In Reservoir Dogs the whole opening scene of twisting the guys ear off or whatever it was. I dunno, I switched it off before it got worse and never saw the rest.

In From Dusk Till Dawn, the first half is Tarantino’s half, and he rapes and kills a woman because he’s seriously disturbed, and it’s treated like a minor inconvenience on their journey. The second half is pure hollywood violence, which I liked, but it sits incongruously next to the very disturbingly realistic first half.

And no, it doesn’t make it better to have Hollywood violence, just more acceptable in my eyes. Somehow it’s less offensive.

I dunno. Like I said, it’s just my opinion. You might see justification for that kind of stuff, but I don’t. It bothers me, in fact it disturbs me greatly. I stay away from all his movies now.

9

Well, they are professional killers, and all. To them, it is a minor problem. They should get all freaked out that they accidentally took a human life that they weren’t paid to take? I’d also make a distinction between playing the death itself for laughs, which the film did not do, and playing the aftermath of the death for laughs, which is what happened.

It’s significant that the character directly responsible for that death is killed himself later in the movie. Or possibly earlier. I forget where those two scenes were placed in relation to each other.

If that’s the scene I think it was (haven’t seen the movie in several years) then that scene was absolutely not played for laughs. It was one of the most affecting death scenes I’ve ever seen. Absolutely sickening, yes. And deliberately so; that character is supposed to be a psychopath that frightens even the other hardened criminals in the gang.

Hmm. I don’t remember From Dusk 'til Dawn well enough to comment on it. I’d completely forgotten about it when I made my earlier post.

How does “more acceptable” and “less offensive” not equal “better”?

I know. I’m not one of those people who gets all indignant when someone disses one their pet artists. I’m just interested in better understanding your opinion, and maybe presenting an alternate view if you’re open to it. I think these sort of discussions are most illuminating when you have two entirely contradictory viewpoints in play.

It bothers me, too. It’s supposed to bother you. You’re looking at a representation of a human life being snuffed out, violently and painfully, by people who take no more notice of what they’ve done than they would the swatting of a fly. That’s intensely fucked up, and the difference between Quentin Tarantino and Jerry Bruckheimer is that Tarantino rubs your face in how fucked up it is. If you’ve just watched someone put a bullet into the head of an innocent man and then crack a joke about it, and that doesn’t disturb you, then there’s either something wrong with you, or something wrong with the movie.

10

Well put. If anything, that would made Tarantino’s less lightweight “sick” treatment of death less sick than the glib treatment it gets in Bruckheimer movies.

11

It seems to me that fans of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction don’t talk about them like they’re full of disturbing characters who deserve their come-uppance after their horrific behaviour. They seem to instead think they’re funny movies because Mr Pink doesn’t like his nickname and Vincent and Jules have silly chats about McDonalds in France.

It’s the juxtaposition that bothers me. They aren’t enough of one thing to justify the other. They aren’t light enough in realism to justify the off-the-cuff humour, but they are so dark they should be taken much more seriously than Tarantino actually seems to.

Miller, you seem to be arguing that they are taken seriously by fans as dark movies. I haven’t seen any evidence of that, either in fans or in Tarantino himself.

12

GuanoLad writes:

> In Pulp Fiction there’s a bump in the road and they accidentally shoot a guy in
> the head and splash blood over themselves, and they treat it like a minor
> problem and start having a scene that’s clearly meant as comical.
>
> In Reservoir Dogs the whole opening scene of twisting the guys ear off or
> whatever it was. I dunno, I switched it off before it got worse and never saw
> the rest.
>
> In From Dusk Till Dawn, the first half is Tarantino’s half, and he rapes and kills a
> woman because he’s seriously disturbed, and it’s treated like a minor
> inconvenience on their journey. The second half is pure hollywood violence,
> which I liked, but it sits incongruously next to the very disturbingly realistic first
> half.

[Note: I’m going to spoil all these films.] I think that you’ve misunderstood all these scenes. The point of the scene where the guy in the back seat is killed by accident is that Travolta and Jackson have just survived in the previous scene despite the fact that they ought to have died. The guy hiding in the apartment shot them at close range six times and somehow managed to miss every single shot. They lived and yet should have died except for a weird fluke, while the guy in the back seat died but should have lived except for a weird fluke. The reason that Jackson survives the film and Travolta doesn’t is that Jackson has the decency in the diner scene to walk away from the robbery without killing anybody (and to let the thieves have the money). For Travolta, his survival and the guy dying in the back seat was just dumb luck, while for Jackson it was a Message from God.

Neither Michael Madsen cutting the ear off nor the actions of Tarantino’s character in the first half of From Dusk to Dawn is supposed to be funny. They are sick bastards even compared to the lowlifes that they hang around with. They aren’t supposed to merit our sympathy.

13

GuanoLad writes:

> They seem to instead think they’re funny movies because Mr Pink doesn’t like
> his nickname and Vincent and Jules have silly chats about McDonalds in France.

There are perceptive fans of Tarantino and there are ones who miss the point. If there was nothing in the films except the fact that the fact that the criminals are charming and articulate, they would be merely clever junk. (And, furthermore, they wouldn’t even be realistic, since criminals aren’t charming or articulate.) I can see why you are bothered by the number of Tarantino fans who miss the point though.

14

Yeah, but who gives a shit? Charles Manson thought The Beatles were advocating a race war, and committed multiple homicides to hasten its coming. Does that make John Lennon a sick fuck? The Bible is a great work of literature (wether fiction or non-fiction being beside the point) that a lot of people misinterpret in really fucked up ways. Is that a reflection on the Bible or its authors? I certainly don’t think so. An artist can’t be held responsible for the misinformed, uneducated reactions of every dipstick who wanders into a theater, record store, or bookshop and totally fails to understand the point of the work.

Speaking of silly chats about McDonalds, I have the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, and between every two songs, there’s a clip of dialogue from the movie. Including the Quarter Pounder conversation. And you know what? Removed from the context of the movie, they’re not remotely funny or interesting. What makes them work in the movie is the contrast between this utterly banal conversation the two characters are having, and the horrible crime they are about to commit. This is a good example of the contrasts that drive Tarantino’s work. More on that in a second:

Again, that juxtaposition is supposed to bother you. If it were one thing or the other, there would be almost nothing to distinguish his films from every other action movie out there. If it were lighter, it’d be another empty Bruce Willis, kill-then-quip shoot 'em up. If it were darker, it’d be turgid Spielburg moralizing. It’s the frission created by the contrast between the graphic violence and the hip stylism that makes Tarantino’s movies exciting. Watching the ineffably cool, well-dressed, drop-dead handsome Michael Madsen grooving out to “Stuck in the Middle with You” while torturing a cop to death sends diametrically opposed messages, which forces the audience to engage the film if only to sort out how to react. The film seems to be saying, “This guy is cool. This is how to act. Be like this guy.” But what he’s doing is clearly hideously evil. Is the film endorsing violence and torture? Unlikely, since that same character is gunned down moments later for precisely for acting in such an inhuman manner. Textually, that can’t be the interpretation. But stylistically, that’s clearly the message. The camera loves Madsen in that sequence. The visual vocabulary of the scene clearly casts him in a favorable light, quite apart from what’s happening on the level of the script. Is the film advocating style over content, or commenting on the emptiness of outward appearances? On a meta-textual level, what is Tarantino saying about movies that use these same techniques to glorify a character for killing people in similarly hideous fashions, albeit with more sanitized representations of violence?

Of course, like all truly great art, the movie only poses these questions. It does not answer them, because that’s not Tarantino’s job as an artist, that’s our job as his audience. That’s the core of my objection to you terming Tarantino a “sick fuck,” because art doesn’t serve to reveal the nature of the artist, but the nature of ourselves, in how we react to the art.

Not to get all snarky, but you’re looking at evidence of it right now. I’m a fan. I take his films seriously as dark movies. And I am hardly alone.

15

One additional note about the banal dialogue:

Tarantino’s went on record as saying that, to them, it’s just a job. And so they talk about mundane things. Face it, a lot of us talk about banal, unimportant things when we’re on the job.

16

His movies make me sick.

I shall continue to think of him as a sick fuck, if it’s all the same to you.

17

You’re entitled, but that sounds like a cop out.

18

Do you know what “gratuitous” means?

Your Schwarzeneggers are FILLED with gratuitous violence. Violence that is just there to provide a little more filler, a couple more chances to put in some gunshots, explosions and splatter.

In Tarantino movies, the violence is the point. It’s not gratuitious at all. It couldn’t be removed without fundamentally altering the movie.

I think that’s your problem with it. You sound like you prefer your violence to be gratuitous.

It repulses you in Tarantino movies because it is presented (somewhat) realistically. If Hollywood was more responsible about it’s depictions of violence, you’d have that feeling more often.

19

You really missed the point of that scene. It’s intended to show the depths of Richie’s depravity, that underneath his nerdy, harmless exterior he’s a ravening monster, a foreshadowing of his quite literal transformation later on. This serves to show the contrast between Richie’s sick psychopathy and his brother Seth’s (George Clooney) comparatively innocent nature; Seth might be a thief, but he’s not evil. This gets the audience’s sympathy for his character when he becomes a (comparatively) good guy fighting the vampires.

Really, Tarantino’s films are not for people who don’t grasp that the world is not black and white; Tarantino’s character’s are complex blends of good and evil, and they manage to gain our sympathy even when they act in morally complicated ways. For example Beatrix Kiddo kills a mother in front of her child, but we know that having the child see the murder was accidental, and that the mother’s death was fully deserved. We’re on Beatrix’s side, even though she has done something horrific, because the audience can see the full dimension of the moral context of the act.

20

How disappointing.