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When was it that movie actors all started shooting guns with
both hands? It happened overnight. All those years, all those Westerns and
gangster films, where you only used two hands if you were using two guns. Now,
if an innocent girl when confronting her assailant manages to grab a gun, why,
she clutches it in both hands and holds it in outstretched arms, just like
she’s seen it in the movies.
– John Boorman (1)
Quentin
Tarantino’s script for Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) clearly contains a heavy
dose of autobiographical fancy. Christian Slater plays Clarence – at the start,
a pretty ordinary schmuck who works in a hip comics store (in Tarantino’s
real-life case, a video store). Suddenly into his life walks Alabama (Patricia
Arquette), a ditzy whore with a heart of gold. Clarence is instantaneously
propelled into a glamorously seedy world of sex, drugs, money and Hollywood
movie producers. Tarantino has freely admitted that Alabama is something of a
dream doll for his alter ego Clarence – the kind of Perfect Woman that only a
lonely nebbish working in a video store, overdosing on classic gangster B
films, could project.
It is easy
for a skeptical viewer to watch True
Romance and feel that it is a film off in the clouds – a live-action
cartoon which entertains absolutely no relation, literal or symbolic, to the
actualities of daily, social violence happening in any of the troubled
hot-spots or urban pressure-cookers of today’s world. Who could make such a
film, or even enjoy watching it, if they had not somehow already severed the
reality of violence and death from the hypnotic, spectacular, hilarious
depictions of it in the action movies of John Woo, Walter Hill, Guy Ritchie or John
McTiernan?
Tarantino
knows all this, avowing time and again publicly that he is in love only with
movie violence – violence as fun, fantasy, fiction and dramatic metaphor. The
apotheosis of this in his work, and its most successful expression to date, is Kill Bill (2003-4). This evident disconnection between violence in the world and violence
on the screen is easy to assert, and certainly easy to seize on as a defense of
one’s viewing enjoyment. But it is far harder to really understand and absorb.
Nonetheless,
in a public debate where acts of movie violence are often carelessly and
hysterically conflated with real crimes of violence – the usual link being some
spurious cry of mass desensitisation – it can still be useful to remind
ourselves of the artifice of movies, and of the many and varied ways of
cinematic action, particularly since the 1960s. The ‘bullet in the head’
syndrome so beloved of Tarantino is a figure of movie lore. British film critic
Raymond Durgnat, in collaboration with Judith Bloch and Scott Simmons, has
argued that popular cinema’s action genres – not only crime thrillers but also
swashbucklers, war films and Westerns – are, at their most physical and
visceral level, transparently built on fantasy. They often pretend to offer the
nitty-gritty documentation of ‘professionals at work’ – all that fiddly,
beautifully rendered detail of guns being loaded, prey stalked, gadgets wired
and triggered, like in John Badham’s Point of No Return (aka The Assassin, 1993) – but the ultimate gun (or sword or
knife) play belongs to “the realm of impulse, a magic of the wish made deed”. (2)
Durgnat and
Bloch trace the gradual evolution of this movie fantasy, with weapons such as
the gun becoming more and magical in American movies of the 1940s and ‘50s. The
trend peaks not in Hollywood, however, but in the radical takes on action
genres performed elsewhere – in the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa (whose Yojimbo, 1961, was remade by Walter Hill
as Last Man Standing, 1996), and in
the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone that launched the career of Clint
Eastwood. In these movies, it is not only the guns which attain
near-supernatural powers, but the heroes too, with their “fantastic
prescience”, their amazing abilities to see villains around corners and hear
the slightest pin-drop in an abandoned warehouse or empty landscape.
In this
period of the early ‘60s, movie violence becomes something very different to
what it was in disturbing films noir like Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953): it suddenly becomes excessive, inflated, parodic, tongue-in-cheek. This
element of obvious artifice in the depiction of violence, with its attendant
possibilities for liberatingly tasteless humour, has remained in popular
cinema, particularly in the horror-comedies of early Peter Jackson (Braindead)
and late Sam Raimi (Drag Me to Hell).
Today, we routinely call such movies cartoonish for a good reason: their black
humour, fuelled by the dare to any audience to take such violence seriously, is
the live-action adaptation of the fantastic protocols of animated violence,
from Tom and Jerry and The Roadrunner to Itchy and Scratchy in The Simpsons.
Cartoons
take us to Pop Art; and fantastic prescience leads us to the ethos of cool.
Again, it is national cinemas other than America which make the really
significant contributions here. In France, the ‘classical purist’ Jean-Pierre
Melville took the heroes of American thrillers, iconicised them, and gave them
a new and fantastic poise within a painterly world of movie unreality. Alain
Delon in Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967)
is the indisputable godfather of the charismatic Hong Kong idol Chow Yun-Fat in
John Woo’s The Killer (1990) – not to
mention Ryan Gosling in Drive (2011).
In Japan, the remarkable Cinemascope crime films of Seijun Suzuki or Masahiro Shinoda
(Pale Flower, 1964) stylised violence
to the point of total, kinetic abstraction, anticipating the Japanese Tetsuo movies and anime by about two
decades.
A key movie
in the history of screen violence, Point
Blank (1968) with Lee Marvin, was the first American assignment of a gifted
young British director, John Boorman, who seemed to bring the hip culture of
London with him. This was, in the mid ‘60s, an intellectual and creative milieu
where the radical art historian and critic Lawrence Alloway moved freely from
promoting British Pop Art to writing about gangster movies in a book called Violent America, bridging such diverse
interests in exactly the way Jean-Luc Godard did in the synthetic sci-fi world
of Alphaville (1965). It is not a
great step from the Pop Art stylistics of Point
Blank and Alphaville to the
much-disparaged ‘designer violence’ of Tony Scott’s direction in True Romance – limbs and feathers
floating choreographically in a shallow, telephoto-lens space.
It is hard
to underestimate the role of Godard, and the Nouvelle Vague generally, in this
genealogy of modern screen violence – and Uma Thurman as a reincarnated Anna
Karina in Pulp Fiction (1994) verifies the fact. Godard defined cool in À bout de souffle (1960), mixed Brecht, Warhol and surrealist poetry in Alphaville, offered us a terrorist
bankrobber and a wimpy cop as a modern-day Carmen and Joseph in Prénom Carmen (1983). Godard’s own
politics urged him to play down violent spectacle, to severely de-dramatise it
(in Alphaville, a fight scene is
reduced to frozen tableaux of guns in hands, heads next to tyres, etc) and, in
the name of both fun and instruction, to play up artifice: “it’s not blood,
it’s red”, we hear off-screen in Made in
USA (1966), as paint is messily splashed on would-be corpses. Furthermore,
in coining the famous aphorism “all you need to make a film is a girl and a
gun”, Godard added a certain play-acting, ironic, second degree dimension to
Hollywood’s violent scenarios, by turns shambling and anarchistic in tone,
which has influenced subsequent filmmakers from Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Little Chaos, 1966), Wim Wenders (Hammett, 1983), Wayne Wang (Life is Cheap ... but Toilet Paper is
Expensive, 1990) and Aki Kaurismaki (I
Hired a Contract Killer, 1990) to Tarantino and his confrères (Roger Avary, Eli Roth, Robert Rodriguez).
Yet, at the
same time that Godard was making a joke of screen violence, he was also trying
to produce powerful, uncomfortable, highly disorienting emotional and
intellectual effects with it, from Karina’s street death in Vivre sa vie (1962) to the inexplicable,
grinning skulls of Made in USA, via all of the automobile collisions and road deaths that litter this
auteur’s career. Weekend (1968), with its elliptical and abrasive visions of car mania and
cannibalism at world’s end, speaks to a new vision of cinema violence, a new
mission for the spectacle of screen death. It indicates the double-barreled
cultural action going on, the world over, by the end of the 1960s. Parody and
cool remain but filmmakers, driven to reflect on a torn and convulsing society,
seek to up the ante on screen violence, to introduce a new and shocking
component of confrontation, horror and visceral effect.
It is hard
today to really evoke the shock that the bloody ending of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde must have generated in 1967. Many films followed in its wake, especially those
of Sam Peckinpah such as The Wild Bunch (1969). The emotional impact of these films was very different to the more
dispassionate, social-realist chill imparted by Hollywood art movies like
Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967). Bonnie and Clyde tapped a crucial,
largely inarticulate ambivalence in audiences and critics alike; viewers were
appalled, but also moved to paeans about a new “lyricism of death”, as mythic
gangsters’ bodies rose, fell and spurted buckets of blood in graceful slow
motion. Symptomatically James Toback, a literature professor at the time who
was later allowed to unleash his own rough fantasies in films from Fingers (1978) to Black and White (2000) via Bugsy (1991), defended this wave of cinema fiercely in the context of a sociological
symposium on Violence, Causes and
Solutions. (3) Grabbing the Nouvelle Vague motto of “style as morality”, he
celebrated the screen’s grubby, Norman Mailer-like displays of violent,
unresolved emotions; his key examples were Bonnie
and Clyde and Point Blank.
So, after
the history lesson, what might people be actually saying when they describe any
random contemporary film as violent? The word covers a diverse range of complex
cinematic conventions, not to mention variable emotional effects engendered
between screen and spectator. It can mean a film that shows violent acts
graphically and in a prolonged way, as when martial arts star Cynthia Rothrock
castrates her enemies in action B movies like Angel of Fury (1992). It can mean
a film that generates a violent effect through sophisticated means of audience
manipulation, as thrillers have done from the era of Hitchcock to that of De
Palma, Hill and Woo, where one is more likely to see and hear panes of glass
smashing than any actual simulation of human injury. It can mean films that,
purely on a psychological plane of the drama, delve into dark, disturbing,
supposedly evil areas of human behaviour in a deliberately understated way,
such as all the movies in the In Cold
Blood psycho-thrill-killer tradition from Badlands (1973), The Boys
Next Door (1985), River’s Edge (1986) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), to Karla (2006), Ted Bundy (2002) and many films by Chuck
Parello or Ulli Lommel. (4)
And for
every new bunch of painfully hip movies that try to make a sophisticated joke
of violence, there are still carefully constructed, highly classical dramas in
the mode of The Big Heat that give a
unmistakably moral, firmly unsensational loading to its moments of death. Even Woo
made one, a Vietnam epic called Bullet in
the Head (1991).
Tarantino,
who is certainly aware of the many threads in the genealogy I have sketched,
plays his own canny games with violent representation. Like Godard or
Fassbinder, he approaches Hollywood action genres from an unusual, backdoor
angle, practicing the kind of ‘termite art’ once proposed by the painter-critic
Manny Farber. One can only misapprehend Tarantino’s debut directorial success Reservoir Dogs (1992) by taking it as an exercise in designer violence and/or gratuitous gore.
Like all his work, it is scarcely a thriller: in its deliberately ragged,
minimalist manner, it spends more time on what guys talk about in cars than on
the mechanics of the plot. And much of the film’s violence is not even on
screen – in the famous torture scene, the camera actually averts its gaze
prudishly at the crucial point of dismemberment. What Reservoir Dogs does display, in spades, is a pleasurably sadistic
grip on a willingly masochistic viewer: the unbearable moments of prolonged
expectancy before a violent act, the brittle banter and catchy ‘70s tunes
aggravating the tension, are what really create the cinematic clinch. Tarantino
is still, today, refining the art of this cinematic sadism in the opening sequence
of Inglourious Basterds (2009).
One of the
most intriguing dimensions of Tarantino’s work is the way it intuitively
fixates on two topics: violent fantasy (especially revenge fantasy) on the one
hand, and a frenzied celebration of carnivorous pop culture consumption on the
other. Tarantino has sized up both himself and his cult audience all too
accurately here. He has sensed, quite rightly, that those spectators most
anxious to get off on airy, bullet-in-the-head stories are also those most in
pursuit of a lifestyle where issues of mass cultural taste – what you know,
what you’ve seen and heard, what you like and dislike – are of paramount
significance, regardless of whether one is being ironically flippant or deadly
serious at the time. (A scene cut from the theatrical release of Pulp Fiction – but restored for some TV screenings – shows Thurman ambushing Travolta and staging a mock video interview in which she probes him on the burning difference
between "Elvis people" and "Beatles people".)
Even though
the combination of these two topics – violence and pop – feels absolutely right
and natural in the movies of Tarantino (or, for that matter, in the TV cartoon
series Ren and Stimpy), the reason
why they should go together in any context is far from obvious. True Romance links up with two films
made exactly a decade earlier – Jim McBride’s remake of Breathless (1983) with Richard Gere and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982) – which propose a particular equation about violence
and pop. In a sense, that abiding disconnection between screen violence and
real violence that we see in so much contemporary audiovisual culture is the
very subject of these three films.
When Gere
loses himself in Jerry Lee Lewis and Silver Surfer comics, or Rupert Pupkin
(Robert De Niro) fixates on talk show comedian Jerry Langford, or Clarence gets
his design for living from Woo’s A Better
Tomorrow II (1987) and a handy Elvis phantasm, we see a pop culture that
offers a full-blown imaginary world, an “image repertoire” (Roland Barthes’
term) of character identifications and fantasy scenarios. More pointedly, the
relation of the fan to this imaginary realm is depicted in these films as
potentially – maybe fundamentally – psychotic, happening in a scary virtual
reality without boundaries or checks. In their very different ways, Atom
Egoyan, Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke have all addressed this theme in their
works of the past fifteen years. Indeed, one the great movies of the 1970s
which Tarantino counts among his three all-time favourites, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), anticipated the psychotic equation of violence and pop, and this
ungrounded, hyperreal, hypersaturated space of daily experience.
Of course,
not all fun-loving aficionados of violent pop cinema are Rupert Pupkin; the
important insight that these films offer is more melodramatic than realistic.
Yet we do live in a time, very different to that in which Durgnat wrote his
critique, in which it is not so easy to dismiss movie depictions of violence as
simply magical fantasies of “the wish made deed”. In the age of gun culture,
when members of the urban dispossessed take their cues for action from the
overheated reveries of gangsta rap, perhaps the old hysteria about
desensitisation and mass brutality has finally come home to roost.
When it
comes to thinking through social upheavals of race and class around the world –
from the Rodney King beating in the US to the Cronulla riots in Australia –
Quentin Tarantino still, at least to the point of Death Proof (2007), had his head in a comfortably dirty fantasy:
fetishising the merry blaxploitation movies of the ‘70s like Shaft, with their mixed-race casts,
their disco kitsch, and their free and easy verbal profanity. Yet, even in his
work, there is a clear impulse to get beyond the veils and codes of mere movie
violence. Scenes like the brutal interrogation of Dennis Hopper by Christopher
Walken in True Romance, or the sudden
shooting in the stomach of Tim Roth by an anonymous woman in Reservoir Dogs remind us of those
clinches of violent cinema more chilling than riotous, like the moment when
Mark Rydell gives his lover “a coke bottle for a nose” in Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). By the end of
the ‘90s, glossy imitations of Tarantino’s violent set-pieces, in films such as
Soderbergh’s Out
of Sight (1998), had turned a scene like the syringe-to-the-heart in Pulp Fiction into familiar black
comedy, no longer terribly provocative. And so Tarantino has leapt, in Inglourious Basterds, to a new level of
spectacular effect: allegorically turning cinema itself, in the climactic
conflagration-slaughter, into a weapon of war and righteous revenge.
Amid all
the play-acting that has filled his films and those of his contemporaries,
Tarantino occasionally aims for moments of truth – true romance or true
violence – that could somehow put all that droll quoting, dreaming and
posturing into some kind of perspective. For without such precious moments of
truth, everything becomes just another bullet in the head.
MORE Tarantino: Jackie Brown, Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood
1. John Boorman, “Bright Dreams, Hard Knocks: A Journal for 1991”, in Boorman and Walter Donohue (eds.), Projections: A Forum for Film Makers (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 85. back
2. See
Raymond Durgnat and Judith Bloch, "Attention:
Men at Work," Film Comment, vol. 15, no. 6
(November-December 1979), pp. 18-26; and Durgnat and Scott Simmons, “Six Creeds
That Won the West”, Film Comment,
vol. (September-October 1980), pp. 69-84. back
3. James Toback,
“Bonnie and Clyde, Point Blank: Style as Morality”, in
Renatus Hartogs & Eric Artzt (eds.), Violence:
Causes and Solutions (New York: Dell, 1970).
4. See Adrian Martin, "The World Ten Times Over: Ongoing Adventures in Pulp Poetry", included in Patreon Reward Level 1 PDF, The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down (2017). back © Adrian Martin July 1994 / February 2010 |
