Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory: Aesthetics and Dialectics in Late Postmodernity [1st ed.] 9783030438180, 9783030438197

Citation preview

Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory Aesthetics and Dialectics in Late Postmodernity Federico Pagello

Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory

Federico Pagello

Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory Aesthetics and Dialectics in Late Postmodernity

Federico Pagello D’Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara Chieti, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-43818-0 ISBN 978-3-030-43819-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Maciej Bledowski/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Many circumstances made the realization of this book quite a long process. The idea first came to me right after my Ph.D. graduation, back in 2009, when I was living in Bologna. It stayed, and grew, with me in Limoges (2011), London (2012) and Nashville (2015–2016), before finally taking shape as a book proposal in Belfast, where I lived between 2013 and 2017. The project eventually became an actual book in Italy, where I unexpectedly returned in 2018—and more precisely in Bologna where it all had started, as well as over many writing sessions in Summit, NJ and my hometown, Vicenza, during the last couple of years. This rather convoluted journey might explain some of its shortcuts, which are otherwise due to my weaknesses. If this work exists, and holds any interest, that is certainly due to the many people, networks and institutions that have stimulated and supported me throughout the last ten years or so. My first thanks of course are for the anonymous reviewers, my editors Lina Aboujieb and Emily Wood, and Palgrave Macmillan, who concretely produced this book, which is not only a matter of ideas but also an actual object (even if you are reading a digital version of it). I then must thank my family (and particularly my late aunt Afra) who have always supported, one way or another, my love for studying—and encouraged the one for cinema. My mentor and friend, Monica Dall’Asta, who despite her doubts, has made this book possible, as is the case for most of my other little achievements. The conversations (and the arguments) I have v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

had with Marco Grosoli since our doctoral years played an important role in the way I have engaged with the issues discussed here. Even when apparently unrelated, the exchanges and collaboration I had with colleagues at the numerous institutions where I worked over these last several years have all, somehow, contributed to this work. I can only thank some of them: Claudio Bisoni, Michele Canosa, Paolo Noto, Giacomo Manzoli, Guglielmo Pescatore, Michele Fadda, Sara Pesce, Luca Barra, Sara Casoli and everybody in the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna; Jacques Migozzi, Natacha Levet, Loïc Artiaga, Irène Langlet and the research unit Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles at the University of Limoges; Maurizio Cinquegrani and the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London; Dominique Jeannerod, John Thompson, Michael Pierse, Alex Koensler, Fabian Schuppert, Stefano Baschiera, Manuel Braganca, Isabel Hollis, Portia EllisWoods, Michael Alijewicz, Brendan Weaver, Andrew Pepper, Gül Kaçmaz Erk, Christopher J. V. Loughlin, Ashok Malhotra, Leonie Hannan, the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities and the School of Arts, English and Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast; Todd Hughes, Mona Fredrick and the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University. I also want to thank the other colleagues with whom I am currently collaborating, including Valentina Re, Matthieu Letourneux, Sándor Kalai, Markus Schleich, Anna Keszeg, Kim Toft Hansen, Massimiliano Coviello, Guido Mattia Gallerani, Thomas Morsch and all the contributors to DETECt. Without my friends (and the music I played with some of them), this would have been less enjoyable—and less meaningful. Above all, I need to thank Aubrey Porterfield. Not only for having been the first reader, proofreader, and editor of this book, which she followed for the last few years, constantly encouraging me and helping me find both ideas and enthusiasm. But, especially, for the time we have shared together—so much of which was devoted to the pleasures of watching films, and talking about cinema and theory, from those first, beautiful months in Belfast, to our rare and precious days in Nashville, Vicenza, Summit and Bologna. Some of that time together is somehow captured in these pages; some more will be written down in the future.

Contents

1

2

3

Introduction 1 ‘Late Postmodernity,’ Film Theory and Tarantino’s Cinema 2 Aesthetics 3 Dialectics 4 Subjectivity 5 Spectatorship, Genre and Violence 6 Conclusion References

1 5 13 15 18 20 22 27 31 36

Beyond Postmodernism 1 Rancière’s Aesthetic Theory 2 From Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime to Tarantino’s Cinema 3 ‘Thwarted Fables’ 4 Tarantino’s Film Aesthetics: Reservoir Dogs 5 Conclusion References

42 45 51 58 63

Space, Time and Dialectics 1 A Dialectical Approach to Postmodernism 2 Jameson, Tarantino and Film Studies 3 Space and History in Jameson’s Theory

65 70 76 81 vii

viii

CONTENTS

4

Space and History in Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight 5 Time and Narrative in Jameson’s Theory 6 Time and Narrative in Pulp Fiction References 4

5

Subjectivity and Dialectics 1 Žižek’s Dialectical Thinking, Postmodernism and Film Studies 2 Subjectivity and Negativity in Jackie Brown 3 Master–Slave Dialectics in Django Unchained References Spectatorship, Genre and Violence 1 From Clover to Tarantino 2 ‘ This Is Me at My Most Masochistic’ : Kill Bill 3 The Precarious Nature of the Male Gaze: Death Proof 4 History as (Horror) Cinema: Inglourious Basterds 5 (Exploitation) Cinema as History: Once upon a Time… in Hollywood 6 Conclusion References

Index

89 101 107 123 127 131 144 151 162 165 168 176 180 184 189 197 204 207

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

As its title makes clear, this book focuses on three, interrelated subjects: Quentin Tarantino’s cinema, film theory and the concept of postmodernity. All three came to prominence and saw their heyday during the last decades of the twentieth century: a cultural moment that, while very recent, already seems to be far from us in many ways. In this sense, perhaps, this book may appear more as a commentary on our past than as a study fully immersed in our present and looking towards our future. The idea of postmodernity, for instance, explicitly refers to a specific phase in our cultural history, one which many commenters seem to regard as concluded (Toth 2010; van der Akker et al. 2017; Malavasi 2017). As proven by the publication of a few monographs devoted to postmodern cinema in recent years (Constable 2015; Torres Cruz 2014; Duncan 2016; Flisfeder 2017; Wright 2017), film scholars have shown a renewed interest in this topic; their work, however, seems to be linked to the acknowledgement that new scholarly analyses of postmodern culture are now possible because the phenomenon can finally be observed with some historical distance. Even some of the main figures in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s—including Linda Hutcheon (2002) and, with some reservations, Fredric Jameson (Baumbach et al. 2016)—have clearly stated that postmodernism has run its course. Film theory, of course, is more difficult to pronounce ‘dead,’ at least as long as cinema is still around. And yet, during these last few decades,

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7_1

1

2

F. PAGELLO

many theorists have entertained the idea that cinema might have actually come to an end, starting to ponder the ‘end of cinema’ (Gaudréault and Marion 2015) and concepts such as ‘post-cinema’ and ‘post-media’ (Shaviro 2010; Peth˝ o 2012; Denson and Leyda 2016; Hagener et al. 2016). In this sense, would it be perhaps more accurate to talk of ‘postfilm’ theory? Whatever the case, it is certain that every aspect of the notion and practice of film theory as we have known it has been thoroughly questioned for several decades by now. As is well known, since the mid-1990s scholars have debated whether a new phase in the history of Film Studies has started, as the kind of theory that led to the birth of the field as an academic discipline between the 1960s and the 1980s has gone through a severe crisis because of a series of radical objections to its basic epistemological framework (Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Rodowick 2015). Such change in direction has now undoubtedly taken place, and much of what constituted the basis of film theory in those years is currently questioned, disregarded or simply ignored. As concerns the work of Tarantino’s cinema, things are again different. Not only is the American writer-director is very much alive, but his ‘ninth film’ was released just last year, scoring one of his biggest box office results, collecting awards and critical acclaim, as well as the usual amount of controversy, for what immediately appeared as Tarantino’s most personal movie and, according to many, one of his finest. And yet, despite all their enduring commercial and critical success, Tarantino’s works and even his public persona feel somehow more and more out of place in the context of contemporary cinema and its endless dispersal into other forms and practices of digital media. So clearly and vocally opposed to the direction taken by the industry as concerns the use of new technologies in the production, distribution and consumption of cinema, Tarantino is trying to consolidate his filmography as a quintessentially cinematic oeuvre in the traditional sense. His much-publicised plan of quitting film direction after the release of his tenth feature looks like a rather unique testament to his loyalty to an older way of making cinema, not in spite but also because of the determination to continue his creative life by writing novels and directing for stage and television, while also releasing the results of many years of writing critical texts about films, film directors and film history. Tarantino’s projected withdrawal from directing feature films, therefore, could be seen as a way to present his oeuvre as more linked to cinema’s past, rather than to its present or future.

1

INTRODUCTION

3

Leaving aside such uncertain verdicts about their current ‘health,’ the three objects of study of this book certainly have something else in common: their close relationship to cinema. If this is obvious for Tarantino and film theory, the case of postmodernity would appear less clear, as the term refers to a broad range of social and cultural phenomena. One of the premises of this work, however, is that cinema is one of the cultural areas to which postmodern theorists have often looked to develop some of their most influential concepts, as proven by the close attention paid to the medium by authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.1 That the (New) New Hollywood represented one of the most significant and influential manifestations of postmodern culture, for instance, is apparent. The number of mainstream American films that achieved enormous cultural impact and came to embody the ‘cultural logic’ that dominated the period between the 1970s and the late 1990s period is impressive: from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Batman (Tim Burton, 1989), from Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) to The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999). This centrality of cinema in the theoretical debate about postmodernism was the result of the ability of the modern medium par excellence to offer a profound diagnosis of the rise of a new cultural and artistic phase. Postmodern films, as well as postmodern film theory, were capable of developing convincing (or at least very attractive) reflections on the dramatic changes that were happening to the cultural and aesthetic hierarchies that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. In the process, they both changed in very significant ways, not only adapting to a context dominated by electronic media but actively helping to shape it. As mentioned before, however, since the late 1990s the situation has dramatically changed, as the status of both postmodernism and cinema has been thoroughly questioned, leaving scholars to ask what has remained of them in the new century. Is the concept of postmodernity still able to provide insights into the nature of contemporary culture and society? Is twentieth-century film theory still useful for understanding contemporary cinema? This work stems from the desire to address these questions, revisiting the way in which Film Studies has engaged with the notion of postmodernity and postmodernism, and investigating the uncertain nature of contemporary cinema through the examination of the films written and directed by Tarantino.2

4

F. PAGELLO

Since the very beginnings of his career, Tarantino has been regarded as a quintessentially postmodern filmmaker, his films being considered as some of the clearest examples of what has been defined as postmodern cinema3 and, possibly, postmodernism more broadly. Each chapter of the book engages with a series of critical questions that have been debated by film scholars and cultural theorists during the last few decades, while looking at the aesthetic and thematic aspects of Tarantino’s cinema in relation to such issues. In particular, I will examine the various, contradictory ways in which the critical reception of Tarantino’s films has been shaped by a certain reading of postmodernism and postmodern theory, arguing that they can be now reassessed from a different perspective. Equally important for the conception of this book is the idea that Tarantino’s films possess their own theoretical weight. By connecting them to debates about postmodernism and the nature of contemporary cinema, I posit that Tarantino’s individual films, as well as his filmography as a whole, can be approached not just as passive objects, to which one should ‘apply’ a set of theories developed elsewhere. Quite to the contrary, I suggest the work of the writer-director can take up an active role in shaping our understanding of a series of conceptual problems addressed by ‘professional’ film theorists: by looking at them more closely, I try to show how many critics and scholars who ‘applied’ postmodern theory to complex works such as Tarantino’s films did not do justice either to those theories or to the objects analysed. By offering new readings of Tarantino’s work and postmodernism, this book thus tries to explore how certain approaches to film theory can still contribute to our understanding of the role of cinema in contemporary culture. In this introduction, I will first present in detail my approach to this set of questions, describing how they guided the composition of this work. Next, I will present the content and the approach of the first three chapters, in which the other two key words in the book’s title— aesthetics and dialectics—are examined in order to frame my approach to postmodern cinema. Finally, I will anticipate how this theoretical framework is deployed in the fourth and final chapter, which addresses more directly the controversial issue of the representation of gender, History and violence in Tarantino’s films.

1

INTRODUCTION

5

1 ‘Late Postmodernity,’ Film Theory and Tarantino’s Cinema The use of the expression ‘late postmodernity’ in the title of this book intends to signal immediately that this work approaches its objects of study by placing them in a specific historical period—from the mid1990s to the present years—that could be regarded as a different phase from what could be called ‘high’ postmodernity—from the 1960s to mid-1990s. Crucially, this expression is meant to highlight a contradictory situation. On the one hand, following Fredric Jameson (Baumbach et al. 2016), I want to stress that even though postmodernism (the ‘cultural logic’ that dominated the period that could be labelled ‘high’ postmodernity) is definitely over, the fundamental socio-economic structures that supported Western capitalism in the second half of the last century are still very much in place. If it is necessary to question the suitability of the postmodern theory developed in the 1970 and 1980s for examining contemporary culture, the broader concept of postmodernity might still be useful to talk about our present times. On the other hand, to think of these last decades as ‘late’ postmodernity also means to stress that the cultural and political context has changed in such dramatic ways that it is necessary to look at these recent years as a distinct phase within the history of postmodernity.4 The contextual differences between the period from the mid-1990s to the present and that from the 1960s to the 1980s are indeed quite obvious. The 1990s immediately followed the fall of the Wall of Berlin and were marked by a radical acceleration in the process of globalisation, the economic and political expansion of neoliberalism, and the start of the digital ‘revolution.’ The 2000s represented a significant turn in what had appeared to many as the triumph of US-led liberal democracy, with the attacks on 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and finally the disastrous financial crash of 2008. The 2010s continued this challenging period for the Western block, offering a slow economic recovery, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the crisis of the European Union and revamped tensions between the United States, Russia and China, all of which led to Brexit, the election of Trump and the spread of right-wing populism across Europe.5 These three decades ran parallel to the trajectory taken by debates about postmodern culture. The concept reached its maximum popularity in the early 1990s, when it was widely adopted in American mass media and popular culture, that is, well beyond the (largely French) academic circles from which it had initially emerged. Crucially for this work, Pulp

6

F. PAGELLO

Fiction was released in 1994 and was immediately ‘widely regarded as the epitome of popular postmodern cinema’ (Booker 2007: 47). The fortune of postmodern theory, however, went through a sudden and sharp decline in the span of a few years. With the new decade, a series of dramatic events marked an obvious change of direction. Amid 11 September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the crash of Wall Street in September 2008, many of the most provocative claims laid out by postmodern thinkers seemed to be proven false or at least outdated. Just after the destruction of the Twin Towers, Jean Baudrillard himself famously declared that the ‘strike of events’ that would have been one of the (alleged) signs of the victory of postmodern culture during the 1990s had come to an end (Baudrillard 2002). The last decade was even more ‘eventful,’ as the economic struggle continued in many parts of the world, leading to the political changes already recalled, which can only be seen as a radical discrediting of many, if certainly not all, theoretical and political perspectives supported by postmodern thinkers. In fact, statements about any alleged ‘end of History’ as a result of the (relatively) peaceful spread of Western liberal democracy and neoliberal economics have been finally made ridiculous by the series of events briefly listed above. In this context, the book highlights in particular two tendencies in contemporary cultural and art theory: the apparent decline of modern aesthetics and the widespread refusal of dialectical thinking. The fate of Baudrillard’s theory is again the most emblematic. During the 1980s and the 1990s, Baudrillard’s analyses of the rise of media and consumer society appeared to many as a convincing description of the sudden eclipse of the sharp (modernist) opposition between high and low culture as a result of the surprisingly quick and deep penetration of market logic into all aspects of society and culture. As a consequence, Baudrillard’s claims about the end of the dialectical tension at the core of modern art seemed to many media and film scholars entirely confirmed, leading to a search for a ‘post-critical’ approach to cinema and popular culture, and often to the abandonment of aesthetics altogether (Baudrillard 1983, 1994). Since the beginning of the new century, however, most critics and scholars have started to grow tired of such an approach. The political nature of aesthetics, the ideological struggle over popular culture, and the necessity of finding again an articulation of dispersed social and cultural movements are still very urgent problems, whose dramatic consequences do not seem at all to be entirely addressed by postmodern theory. Very

1

INTRODUCTION

7

‘modern’ phenomena, such as religious fundamentalism, political propaganda and nationalisms are firmly back with us in an age that mass media contribute to describe as characterised by Islamic terrorism, so-called fake news, and right-wing populism. This book thus engages with the cinema and film theory of these recent years, supposing these dramatic changes led not only to a turn in political terms but to one in cultural history, characterised by the exhaustion of postmodernism’s hegemony in the latter years of the 1990s.6 As mentioned above, during this period the very notion of film theory became much more uncertain than in the previous decades. In 1996, just at the culminating phase of postmodernism’s cultural influence, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll published their highly influential collection Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. The book intended to provide, in rather polemical terms, the basis for a new theoretical perspective that was presented as incompatible with the various forms of ‘Grand Theory’ (subject-position theory and culturalism) that had dominated the field since the mid-1970s. In fact, Bordwell and Carroll were attacking the fundamental premises as well as the latest consequences of the broader theoretical framework that resulted in the variety of post-structuralist and postmodern readings of late twentieth-century cinema. In the field of film theory, therefore, the decline of postmodernism’s cultural hegemony was clearly apparent as early as in the mid-1990s. As Bordwell remarked in his introductory chapter to Post-Theory, poststructuralist and postmodernist (together with Marxist, psychoanalytic and culturalist) theories offered the dominant perspectives adopted in Film Studies at its inception as an academic discipline during the 1960s and 1970s (Bordwell and Carroll 1996: 6–12). The book harshly criticised such tendencies and quite successfully advocated for the abandonment of their highly speculative approach, claiming that empirically sound research was urgently required to give the field more solid ground. Bordwell and the other contributors to this influential collection reproached ‘Grand Theory’ for its reliance on an eclectic mixture of methods whose epistemological foundations were considered unable to meet the scientific standards required by the academic community in, and outside, the field of Film Studies by the mid-1990s. By championing a less ‘generalising’ and more ‘modest’ approach (Bordwell and Carroll 1996: 26–30), these scholars were thus signalling a crisis of those cultural background that, in the previous decades, had led to the rise of postmodernism.

8

F. PAGELLO

While stressing the symptomatic value of Post-Theory in marking the decline of postmodernism, this book takes an entirely different direction. Each of the first three chapters of this work engages with a theorist—Jacques Rancière, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek—who was or could have been attacked by Bordwell and Carroll on the ground of the arguments laid out in that book.7 For scholars such as Bordwell and Carroll, the kind of film theory proposed by Rancière, Jameson and Žižek represents the unnecessary ‘resistance’ of the aesthetic, Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches which they wanted to abandon. Following their reasoning, in fact, all of these thinkers should be placed in the same field of ‘Grand Theory’ and dismissed on the basis of the same arguments. Quite to the contrary, this book emphasises something different that these three theorists have in common: their critical approach to, and sometimes the sheer refusal of, some of the underlying philosophical, political and ideological perspectives of postmodern theory—in particular, as it was received by many scholars in Film Studies. Here, I will look at the theories of Rancière, Jameson and Žižek stressing how they are either explicitly opposed to that of prominent postmodernist thinkers such as Baudrillard or Lyotard or, as in the case of Jameson, should not be simply interpreted through the lenses of these thinkers, as has too often seemed to be the case in Film Studies (see infra, pp. 76–81). As I will explain, I build on the work of these theorists with the precise goal of offering alternative readings of contemporary (‘late postmodern’) cinema, critically engaging with the reception of Tarantino’s cinema as a very symptomatic example of many misunderstandings that can be found in the existing critical literature. As mentioned above, several of Tarantino’s films—starting with Pulp Fiction—have become synonymous with postmodern cinema and are often referred to as one of the clearest examples of postmodernism more broadly. This is confirmed by three monographs that will be referenced throughout this work: Dana Polan’s Pulp Fiction (2000), M. Keith Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood (2007) and Catherine Constable’s Postmodernism and Film (2015). Dana Polan’s study is the first and still one of the very few English-language academic monographs entirely devoted to Tarantino’s cinema.8 Polan’s approach to the film was extremely important for the shaping of this work (see infra, pp. 9–10, 102), as Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory is also a commentary

1

INTRODUCTION

9

on, and critical response to, this and other scholarly publications that consolidated reading of Tarantino’s work as a perfect embodiment of postmodernism as conceived by Baudrillard, that is, as the product of a phase that I suggest could perhaps be now historicised. Such identification is confirmed quite explicitly by M. Keith Booker. In his Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange, he aims at popularizing his understanding of Fredric Jameson’s conception of postmodernism in general and postmodern cinema in particular. While Booker’s text admittedly simplifies Jameson’s theory, his work is symptomatic of a broad reception of Jameson’s theory as more or less entirely in line with Baudrillard’s work (see infra, pp. 77–79). This is proven by an entirely different, and very critical, reading of Jameson’s work developed by Constable in her Postmodernism and Film. Throughout the book I will examine how a similar approach led many critics and scholars to see in films such as Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino 1992), Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino 2003–2004) a euphoric—and/or nihilistic—embracing of the most ‘superficial’ (in the sense of shallow) citationist culture, whose only raison d’être would lie in the reflexive play with film language and film history. From a larger cultural-political perspective, this reading led commenters to identify Tarantino’s films and/or postmodern cinema more broadly with a process of ‘Disneyfication’ of cinema, with explicit reference to Baudrillard’s formulation of his concept of ‘hyperreality’ as the centre of postmodern culture (Polan 2000: 71; Booker 2007: X–XIV, 111–112, and infra, pp. 72, 87). The consequences of this perspective are evident. Tarantino’s films are regarded as clear examples of postmodernism’s dismissal of the aesthetics and dialectical thinking central to modern culture, as their images and narratives are seen as belonging to a regime in which representation has ceased to refer to any ‘external’ (or, at least, historical) reality or any shared cultural and artistic hierarchies. From this perspective, both the style and the themes of his work do not really have any substance: their visual look and the ‘coolness’ would be the most significant factors, explaining both their success and their cultural significance. The narrative and the characters are regarded as pure metalinguistic elements, deprived of any actual meaning. For Polan—as he also argues in his other book on a quintessential (late?) postmodern work, The Sopranos (2009)—it is a mistake to try to interpret postmodern works such as a Pulp Fiction, attributing to them any ‘deep’ meaning. Building on Susan

10

F. PAGELLO

Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966), Polan affirms that the very act of extracting any sort of meaning from such works is misguided: In post-modernism (…) the universe is not to be seen as meaningful but is, to put it bluntly, simply to be seen – to be experienced in its sheer dazzle, to be lived in the superficiality of its affective sights and sounds. Hence, we witness another important reason for the bits and set pieces in Pulp Fiction: beyond their function as allusions to a history of cinema and American popular culture, they float up from the film as so ‘many’ cool moments, hip instances to be appreciated, ingested, obsessed about, but rarely to be interpreted, rarely to be made meaningful. (Polan 2000: 79)

Baudrillard’s influence, either implicitly or explicitly, is obvious here. Scholars such as Polan and Booker share with the French theorist the conception of postmodernism as an absolute rejection of modern aesthetics and a belief that the art produced in the 1960s and the subsequent decades is impermeable to dialectical thinking. Art has ceased to be able to ‘signify’ as a result of these more fundamental issues. The evacuation of meaning results from postmodernism’s rejection of the idea of autonomy of aesthetics and thus the possibility of approaching aesthetics from a dialectical perspective. In late capitalism, Baudrillard argued, all cultural activities have been subsumed by the logic of capital, which obliterates any difference between the artistic work and the commodity. Postmodernism, and Tarantino’s films, should thus not be analysed through the (still modernist) perspective of interpretation, looking for their aesthetic qualities and the dialectical tension with—or resistance to—consumer culture. Aesthetics has been cannibalised by the aestheticisation that rules the complete commodification of culture, so that art is no longer something external to the latter. The tension between art and non-art, which is necessary to establish a dialectical movement, is thus also inevitably lost. It is important to stress that an apparently opposite approach to Tarantino, and postmodern cinema more broadly, has been often proposed by other film scholars, such as Peter and Will Brooker (1996), the aforementioned Catherine Constable (2015), and David Roche (2018). These critics have taken their cue not from the overall pessimistic approach of Baudrillard, but from the ‘affirmative’ postmodernism proposed by scholars such as Linda Hutcheon (1988, 1989), who was inspired instead by the rather different approach developed

1

INTRODUCTION

11

by another French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard (1984, 1992). From this perspective, films such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill are regarded as perfect examples of (postmodern) ‘metafiction,’9 but this does not reduce their ability to produce extremely complex signification and generate serious cultural debates. As argued most clearly by Hutcheon in Politics of Postmodernism (1988), which provides a model for Constable’s and Roche’s reading of Tarantino’s films and postmodern cinema more broadly, Lyotard’s transhistorical concept of postmodernism emphasises the critical value of such cultural production, in explicit polemic with Fredric Jameson’s (apparently) Baudrillardian argument. A well-known example is found in the entirely opposed ways in which Hutcheon and Jameson evaluate the role of parody. For Jameson, parody has become impossible in postmodernism, because it relies on establishing that critical distance between cultural works and the society’s economic, political structure that he deems unattainable for contemporary arts. For Hutcheon, on the contrary, parody is the quintessential postmodern form, as it is based on the assumption that culture cannot achieve a true distance from that structure but, nevertheless, is able to convey a critical message (Hutcheon 1988: 22–36; 124–140; 1989: 89–113). In the case of Tarantino, this approach led to fruitful studies, whose most conspicuous product so far is arguably David Roche’s recent book, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction (2018). The fourth, comprehensive academic monograph addressing the filmography of the writer-director, Roche’s work is also surprisingly the first scholarly book in English firmly grounded in contemporary film theory to fully engage with Tarantino’s oeuvre as a whole, adopting a perspective that is both aesthetic and cultural.10 The author presents his work as adopting the methods of both cultural studies and neo-formalism, building on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, on the one hand, and David Bordwell’s (post-)film theory, on the other. Roche’s book offers extremely detailed and very insightful close readings of the form and the themes in Tarantino’s films, completely different from the theses of scholars like Polan and Booker. For Roche, Tarantino’s films are replete with significance. They are a mine of signification strategies, an example of metafiction which is able to contribute to a critical intervention in the field of cultural history. Tarantino’s approach to representation, in particular, is read through the lenses of cultural studies’ identity politics. The narrative

12

F. PAGELLO

and the characters at the centre of the films are seen as commentaries on stereotypical images of gendered and racialised subjects, whose struggle for emancipation is, for Roche, depicted in a politically progressive way. While also building on Roche’s convincing study, this book takes another perspective, attempting to fill a gap in the scholarship about Tarantino and the concept of postmodern cinema. First of all, I intend to look at the work of the American writer-director from a theoretical perspective that is neither Baudrillard’s nor Lyotard’s (and, therefore, Hutcheon’s). Both perspectives are deeply linked to the cultural and political context of the 1970s and 1980s. Tarantino’s cinema, in my view, can be better analysed by taking into consideration the various criticisms that these accounts of postmodernity have received in those in the following decades. As stated above, in fact, Tarantino can and must be seen as the product of a later phase, in which an awareness of some contradictions in postmodern culture has spread. From this angle, despite their (radical) differences, the two perspectives on Tarantino and postmodern cinema sketched out above share in fact some deeper commonalities. While opposed in their evaluation of the political significance of postmodernism, they agree on something more fundamental: the clear distinction between modern aesthetics and postmodern anti-aesthetics and, crucially, the conviction that this opposition is based on a fundamental theoretical assumption: postmodernism’s refusal of dialectical thinking. What Baudrillard and Lyotard share is indeed their affirmation that the end of modern(ist) aesthetics is linked to the exhaustion of dialectical thinking. Their reading of postmodernism as the abolition of aesthetic distance and the ‘overcoming’ of the dialectical tensions between art and politics, art and history, representation and aestheticisation are expressions of this fundamental assumption. In my view, however, such an anti-dialectical approach neglects some relevant aspects of both postmodernism and Tarantino’s cinema. To adopt a more dialectical perspective towards contemporary culture is to highlight that postmodernism has been a contradictory phenomenon, one that cannot be reduced to a simple negation and/or reversal of the cultural assumptions and hierarchies of modernism. In particular, this book adopts a conception of aesthetics that differs from both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s, one that comes into focus by analysing Tarantino’s films through the conceptual lenses of Rancière, Jameson and Žižek.

1

2

INTRODUCTION

13

Aesthetics

The first chapter engages with Rancière’s aesthetic theory, which explicitly refuses the premise shared by Baudrillard and Lyotard by arguing that the entire discourse of postmodernism can simply be dismissed. Interestingly enough, Rancière’s direct interventions in the field of cinema are admittedly influenced by the tradition launched by Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s. More than the controversial auteurism associated with this school, the fundamental theoretical move proposed by the future directors of the Nouvelle Vague11 is that the relationship (and the hierarchy) between commercial and artistic films had to be conceived in a dialectical way. In the field of film theory, this meant that classical (Hollywood) cinema should not be approached as the opposite of art cinema, that is, as a manifestation of a capitalistic logic that would erase any aesthetic significance from this production. Even more radically, these critics preferred films that belonged to genres stemming from popular fiction (e.g. Hitchock’s thrillers, Hawks’s Westerns and comedies) over many auteur films explicitly based on high-brow sources such as ‘literary’ novels and classical plays. Their point was not to deny the tension between ‘artistic’ and ‘commercial’ aspects of culture: quite to the contrary, they stressed that the coexistence of these two poles within a single work characterises all of the artistic production since the rise of modern, capitalist society. Taking up this perspective, Rancière refuses the very idea that postmodernism represents an actual break from the situation in which the arts have found themselves since the eighteenth century. For the French philosopher, the whole of modern and contemporary art inhabits the same problematic status between aesthetics and aestheticisation that the postmodernists see as the unique purview of postmodernism. According to this view, the tension between art and non-art, that is, the question of whether the work is significant in the sense of traditional art—particularly dramatic, narrative art—should therefore be replaced with the different question of the political value of aesthetics after the end of modern(ist) utopias. This point of view is, for Rancière, highly problematic. First, postmodernism seemed to lead to the melancholic conclusion that art had lost all of its political value, and now it could only provide an ethical response to social conflicts. Such is the very critical reading that Rancière offers of both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s theories of postmodernism, with the clear goal of reaffirming that art has its own political value that postmodernism fails to appreciate because it is still

14

F. PAGELLO

too tied to the history of modernism. Secondly, Rancière argues that since the Eighteenth century—in the context of what he calls ‘the aesthetic regime’—the very core of the aesthetic coincides with the experience of being confronted with works that challenge any traditional definitions, hierarchies and sets of prescriptions deciding what is to be included in the realm of art. Both of these ideas focus on the tension within the work of art and that between art and its public. In particular, when writing about cinema, Rancière emphasises the contradictory relation between narrative and sensory perception. On the one hand, cinema would seem to confirm a general characteristic of art in the aesthetic regime, that is, the decline of traditional narrative—as defined by Aristotle in the Poetics —as a prescription for art. On the other hand, however, cinema is the field of modern art in which narrative has come back with a vengeance. For Rancière this is not a coincidence, but rather the ultimate proof that any work of art necessarily presents contradictory elements in order to allow the audience to confront a constant oscillation between pure sensory experience and conventional structures of signification. The reception of Tarantino’s films, as I try to demonstrate throughout this book, seems to me to offer a perfect case in point. The opposing reading of Tarantino’s films as completely ‘meaningless’ or, on the contrary, as some of the most significant examples of postmodern cinema are, in my view, much less the consequence of their alignment with a Baudrillardian or Lyotardian framework than with the tension between these two tendencies: the emergence of a non-narrative, sensory artwork and the presence of a compelling story. In my view, this ambivalence is intrinsic to Tarantino’s body of work and can only be fully understood as the commitment of the writer-director to affirm the ongoing possibility of adopting a proper aesthetic perspective in contemporary cinema. In the first chapter, I use this perspective to discuss films such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. By examining a few scenes in these two movies, I insist that while it is impossible to dismiss the impression that they first and foremost confront the viewer as pure sensory experiences, at the same time it would be a serious mistake to neglect the importance of their characters, narratives and themes. The much-discussed ‘coolness’ of the writer-director’s style, for example, can be very easily recognised as also a theme of these films, which Tarantino treats from an obviously critical angle. In my view, it is thus possible to dismiss the argument that his cinema simply indulges in glamourous, or cynical, representations of

1

INTRODUCTION

15

postmodern society, while it is necessary to acknowledge that its form and content are consciously designed to make the audience experience such aestheticised imagery.

3

Dialectics

Unlike Rancière, who entirely rejects postmodern discourse and proposes a radical alternative view to it, Fredric Jameson offers one of the most in-depth, critical discussions of postmodernism, accepting some of its premises but also profoundly questioning other thinkers’ reading of this phenomenon. It is for this reason that the second chapter, the longest in the book, offers an extended discussion of some key aspects of Jameson’s work: his dialectical approach, the crucial concept of the spatialisation of time, and the roles of narrative and utopian thinking. The chapter then provides a sustained discussion of these issues in relation to three films by Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight (2015). On the one hand, the goal is to prove that the reception of Jameson’s work in Film Studies—both positive and negative—has led to one-sided (that is, non-dialectical) readings of his interpretation of postmodern theory and culture. On the other hand, this chapter aims to show that the first two feature films directed by Tarantino are better understood by seriously applying Jameson’s dialectical approach to space, time and history in postmodern culture rather than the postmodern and Nietzschean lenses which have frequently been used to analyse them. This argument is further developed through a discussion of The Hateful Eight , which Tarantino himself has presented as a rewriting of, and commentary on, Reservoir Dogs . In particular, my focus will be on the film’s treatment of time and space, as well as its representation of race and gender, to show the writer-director’s lucid awareness of the time that has passed, both within and outside of film history. The chapter starts by revisiting Jameson’s theory to suggest that film scholars have often underplayed the crucial role of dialectical thinking in this work, which has allowed for the misleading conflation of his and Baudrillard’s perspectives in books such as Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood and Constable’s Postmodernism and Film. The opening lines of Jameson’ most influential work, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, already suggest why such superimposition is deceiving: ‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the

16

F. PAGELLO

first place’ (Jameson 1991: IX). This statement immediately marks the distance between Baudrillard and Jameson. For Jameson, the analysis of postmodern culture requires a symptomatic approach to highlight how postmodernism’s self -description masks some internal contradictions. In my view, rather than taking them as entirely reliable diagnoses of that cultural climate of the 1970s and 1980s, Jameson addresses Baudrillard’s writings as symptomatic, that is, to be used in a critical way. The declared aim of Jameson’s theorisation is indeed to defend dialectical Marxism from the attacks led by authors such as Baudrillard and Lyotard. For these anti-dialectical thinkers, the raison d’être of postmodernism rests precisely in the realisation that the Hegelian dialectical perspective adopted by Marxist theory has to be abandoned, as they see it as yet another metaphysical and ideological worldview. For Jameson, however, any philosophy necessarily relies on a metaphysical, i.e. ideological, framework (Baumbach et al. 2016: 147), and a claim such as Lyotard’s affirmation of the ‘end of modern metanarratives’—including Marxism—is nothing but another metanarrative, that is, another ideology (Jameson 1984). As the statement cited above makes perfectly clear, Jameson’s approach to postmodernism is therefore different from most thinkers that have worked on this concept, as he thinks of postmodernism through a dialectical perspective in spite of postmodernism’s crucial belief in the necessity of rejecting dialectical thinking. In the field of Film Studies, Jameson’s writings have often been mobilized to argue that contemporary cinema is defined by a primacy of surface, the spatialisation of time and a questioning of the very possibility of representation—all of which have been seen as the domination of purely self-referential culture based on the endless and empty repetition of the clichés (Booker 2007: IX–XX). For instance, film scholars have eagerly embraced, or strongly rejected Jameson’s analysis of what he labelled the ‘nostalgia film’ because of its (alleged) exclusive emphasis on the negative aspect of such phenomenon. Immediately associated with Baudrillard’s notions of simulacrum and hyperreality, the category of nostalgia film has been seen only in its regressive function, leading scholars such as Constable to criticise Jameson’s work as a simplistic and purely backward-looking nostalgia for modernism. In my view, this is a very partial reading of Jameson’s reflections on postmodern theory, as well as on modernism, cinema and popular culture. Even before his engagement with postmodernism, in fact, Jameson’s foundational 1979 article ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’

1

INTRODUCTION

17

stressed how modernism’s own relationship to the cultural industries in general, and the film industry in particular, has to be reassessed in a different way.12 Mass culture was not to be seen as a pure vehicle for the complete subsumption of culture under pro-capitalist ideology but also—necessarily—as the place where the utopian tendencies lying at the core of such an ideology were to be revealed. Later on, Jameson developed this argument by showing how such a dialectical approach could be applied to postmodern cinema, which should thus be seen as a contradictory phenomenon, in which the coexistence of ideological and utopian tensions is always clearly visible. The second chapter engages with these issues to show how Jameson’s writings can help us better address the complexity of Tarantino’s films as examples of cinematic postmodernism that is more than the expression of a society dominated by hyperreality. As Jameson argues in relation to the work of directors such Coppola, Lynch and Cronenberg (see Jameson 1991, 1992), postmodern films ought to be approached critically, through symptomatic readings of their inclination towards pastiche, their apparent elision of history or their melancholic take on utopia. In fact, Tarantino’s films were directly inspired by the New Hollywood filmmakers discussed by Jameson, and they offer similar opportunities to confront postmodernism in a critical, that is, dialectical way. Tarantino grew up on and emerged from that cinema, as well as the exploitation films of the 1960s, and 1970s and 1980s, starting to make his own in the 1990s. Pulp Fiction is better understood as a response to the corrosive films of Scorsese and De Palma than a continuation of the kind of cinema proposed by Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Raiders of the Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1980) or Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), the films that were the primary examples supporting Jameson’s notion of nostalgia film. Tarantino’s cinema is to be seen in this critical line of the earlier, independent American cinema (heavily influenced by European art films), which actively helped to demythologise mainstream Hollywood productions between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. It is no coincidence that, in his interviews, Tarantino constantly mentions films such as Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) or Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) as some of his favourite films as well as among the models for his own work. I believe that these films, as well as Tarantino’s, are best analysed not from a Baudrillardian perspective—which would insist on the end of modernist aesthetics and the dominance of the simulacra—but from a dialectical one—which would emphasise instead their ability to engage critically with the classic Hollywood genres and reflect

18

F. PAGELLO

on their own historical context. The main difference between Tarantino and his precursors, of course, is that the New Hollywood directors started to work in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, that is, at the height of what I have called ‘high’ postmodernity. Rather than looking directly to classical Hollywood cinema—as De Palma did by rewriting Hitchcock’s films— Tarantino reworked the exploitation films of his youth, thus appropriating what was already a quintessential expression of postmodern culture.

4

Subjectivity

As is to be expected, postmodern critics have insisted that the characters at the centre of Tarantino’s films should be regarded as fundamentally irrelevant, as the films’ salient features (or lack thereof) lie exclusively in their flamboyant style, ‘cool’ imagery, popular culture references and so on. Following other commenters (Gallafent 2006; Barlow 2010; Constable 2015; Roche 2018), I argue, by contrast, that the importance of Tarantino’s films is immediately made visible by their complex processes of characterisation and by the richness of their narrative arcs. If the first two chapters highlight how Rancière’s and Jameson’s writings help us think differently about the role of narrative in postmodern cinema, the third focuses on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of subjectivity in order to offer an alternative interpretation of the characters and conflicts at the centre of Tarantino’s films and, perhaps, of late postmodern cinema more broadly. Žižek’s intervention in the field of Film Studies has largely focused on the question of the subject, stressing the philosophical, psychoanalytical and political importance of approaching cinema from this perspective. Interestingly, Žižek harshly criticised Bordwell and Carroll’s dismissal of ‘Grand Theory’ (Žižek 2001), contending that his Hegelian–Marxist– Lacanian approach refutes several crucial tenets of both postmodernism and ‘post-theory.’ Žižek’s explicit goal is to challenge what he sees as one of the fundamental assumptions common to these two approaches: the refusal of the dialectical concept of the subject on the basis of its alleged association with a teleological and totalising logic, which is regarded as the vehicle for conservative, if not totalitarian, politics. For Žižek such a critical stance is based on an incorrect understanding of the concept of dialectics and, particularly, on the assumption that it should be interpreted as a process of reconciliation of the two poles of the contradiction (Žižek 1999). On the contrary, like Jameson (2009),

1

INTRODUCTION

19

Žižek insists that Hegelian dialectics must be conceptualised as the understanding of the negative as the ultimate force that defines—and constantly redefines—the nature of the subject (Žižek 2012). The ‘end’ of the dialectical process consists not in a ‘synthesis’ of the two poles of the contradiction but in a ‘negation of the negation’ in which that antagonism is not solved but preserved and, indeed, constantly revamped in new and unpredictable ways. In fact, no ‘end’ of the dialectical process can be actually identified. For Žižek, as for Jameson, the radical antagonism that moves the dialectical process cannot be eliminated, so that dialectics can never be thought as the path towards a ‘solution’ of the contradiction. The very process of subjectivation is associated with negativity itself, and its dialectical development leads to an equally endless splitting of the subject into a series of self-negations.13 Even when not directly concerned with debates about postmodern film, Žižek’s writings offer countless discussions of themes, plots and characters taken from classic and contemporary cinema. In analysing these films, the Slovenian philosopher adopts a dialectical approach to offer critical and symptomatic readings of the dominant conception of subjectivity in postmodern culture and society.14 The large influence of anti-dialectical postmodernism (and, more broadly, poststructuralism) in Film Studies has led many scholars to consider contemporary cinema as characterised by the adoption of non-linear narrative structures and the depiction of characters embodying the crisis, if not the outright dissolution, of the modern subject. Predictably, Tarantino’s films have been seen as the perfect example of these tendencies, from the use of achronological narratives to the staging of stylised and (allegedly) ‘cartoonish’ characters in Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007). As a result, the Hegelian conception of subjectivity has been seen as completely unsuited for the analysis of these films, which were considered a perfect representation of the ‘fluid’ status of the postmodern subject. The third chapter engages with such debates about Žižek’s theoretical approach as well as with the analysis of these issues in Tarantino’s work through its discussion of Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino 2012). The two films have in common the adoption of an almost entirely linear narrative structure, which is a rather significant aspect of both films and their place in the director’s body of work. Moreover, in both, the

20

F. PAGELLO

narrative structure and focus allow for the portrayal of a series of dialectical reversals through which subjectivity emerges via a set of relationships and conflicts between the protagonist and other characters. Building on Žižek, I suggest that Tarantino’s films represent accurately the contradictory nature of subjectivity instead of the alleged collapse of the subject in postmodern culture.

5

Spectatorship, Genre and Violence

The fourth and final chapter aims to bring together the topics addressed in the rest of the book, using its theoretical framework to consider the representation of gender, History and violence in Tarantino’s films. Drawing on Carol Clover’s psychoanalytic theory, I argue that to address these crucial issues it is necessary to start from the viewer’s subjective perspective, taking into consideration Tarantino’s explicit reflection on cinema’s ability to manipulate the aesthetic experience of the audience. The chapter begins by engaging with the key theoretical assumptions of Clover’s influential book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, illustrating their relevance for the analysis of Tarantino’s films. Not coincidentally, Clover’s book deals with the same type of cinema that the writer-director has constantly used as narrative and stylistic inspiration, offering this film genre as an object of study that invites and sustains questions about the experience of film viewership. The films that interest both Clover and Tarantino are 1970s and 1980s horrors, particularly the slasher and the rape-revenge movie. As mentioned above, Tarantino grew up watching this kind of exploitation cinema, and in his own films aims to recreate for his audiences the same cinematic experience. At the time of their release, these movies were heavily criticised for their graphic representation of violence, as happened to Tarantino’s own films throughout his career. Building on feminist film theory and Laura Mulvey’s ‘ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), critics and scholars claimed that these genres placed the audience in the position of the sadistic, male persecutors. Men, Women and Chain Saws offers a rather original and convincing argument which completely reverses this judgment. Following more consistently Lacanian psychoanalysis, Clover maintains that the sadistic, male gaze theorised by Mulvey and others is in fact fundamentally unstable, and she emphasises how horror films often elicit the male viewer’s participation in the dread and suffering of the female character. As a

1

INTRODUCTION

21

result, she thinks of the enjoyment experienced by the audience of these movies through the notion of ‘female masochism.’ For Clover, this interpretative framework can be applied to the analysis of cinematic aesthetics more broadly, as the pleasure sought by the spectators of cinema most often coincides with that of being manipulated by the film, experiencing a temporary, voluntary loss of mastery over their individual gender identity, their bodies and feelings. To flesh out this argument, in Chapter 5 I discuss a group of films that overtly responds to Clover’s psychoanalytic take on the aesthetics of 1970s and 1980s exploitation horror cinema. In different ways, Kill Bill , Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) can be put in conversation with Clover’s work, to which they implicitly and occasionally explicitly make reference. In fact, Tarantino himself stated he read the book and was deeply impressed by it (Peary 2013: 142). Tarantino’s acknowledgement is so clear that the very first lines in Kill Bill Vol. 1 might be read as a sort of summary of the main thesis of Men, Women and Chain Saws, presenting the story of the Bride as a way to make the viewers reflect on their own ‘sadistic’ as well as ‘masochistic’ enjoyment of the violence they are about to experience. My discussion of the two parts of Kill Bill , and the equally bipartite Death Proof, will insist that they not only illustrate Clover’s theories but also consciously present Tarantino’s dialectical approach to film aesthetics. This line of argument is further developed in a discussion of the thematic and formal features of two recent works by the writer-director. Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood carry on Tarantino’s reflection on the aesthetics of cinematic violence, further exploring the ability of film to manipulate the audience’s reaction. The direct and indirect influence of other theoretical filmmakers, such as Hitchcock and De Palma, is also taken into consideration to highlight these films’ discourse on the role of voyeurism, sadism and masochism in the experience of watching (a certain type of) cinema. Finally, the dialectical aspect of Tarantino’s films is also evident in his recent work from another perspective: the explicit engagement with the relationship between cinema and History in these films poses questions about how it is possible to represent the violence that accompanies any true historical event.

22

F. PAGELLO

6

Conclusion

The conclusions to Chapter 5 also serve as a closure to the entire book. After engaging with his films and what others have written about them, I will bring my argument to a close by paying attention to what Tarantino himself has said about his experience as a film viewer, focusing, as a lens of interpretation, on his declarations about the role of violence in cinema. What emerges from Tarantino’s interviews is a lucid theoretical approach, an explicit goal to express his thinking with the same ambition and even the same tools one would expect from a ‘professional’ film scholar. In many of his interviews, Tarantino has discussed how his education as an artist was rooted in his engagement with film criticism, his study of film history and his attentive analysis of the style and the poetics of filmmakers from a variety of genres, movements and industries. Moreover, he has repeatedly stressed the importance he attaches to his experiences as a ‘film critic’ (when he was working as video-store clerk, but also as a commenter on contemporary cinema),15 a film producer and distributor,16 a programmer and the owner of a historic movie theatre in Los Angeles.17 Tarantino even ‘confessed’ that he thinks of himself as pursuing a ‘Professorship in cinema,’ a ‘career’ that he regards as an endless path of study.18 What this book tries to suggest, however, is something more specific: that Tarantino thinks about his work as a film theorist and, particularly, as a dialectical thinker. This thesis is developed throughout the book from different angles. First of all, I suggest that Tarantino’s dialectical approach is visible not only in the way he presents himself in his interviews, in which he states his commitment to his own critical and theoretical writing, but also in the way this reflexive posture is reflected in his cinematic production. His films show a conscious engagement with what scholars and critics have written about his work. Secondly, my discussions of specific films are intended to highlight their particular connections to ideas laid out by scholars and philosophers such as Rancière, Jameson or Žižek, who argue for the necessity of adopting a dialectical approach to film aesthetics. Such an approach helps me to elucidate the meaningful relationship in each film between style and narrative elements, including themes and characterization. Finally, I will try to show how Tarantino’s engagement with, and intervention in, debates about film theory has given his filmography a peculiar dialectical ‘shape.’

1

INTRODUCTION

23

The internal structure of each individual film and the succession of his films as a set seems to follow a peculiar logic, emphasising contradictions, self-negations and internal rhymes. As I will argue through the analysis of specific connections between different sequences or films, Tarantino’s work highlights a constant interest in linking disparate and contradictory elements within the same work as well as across separate texts to stimulate a series of conflicting feelings and thoughts in the audience. While this is apparent in the form of individual films divided in segments that appear to move narratively and thematically in opposing directions, I want to briefly outline some of the more subtle connections that are discussed in the chapters of this book. In Chapters 3 and 4, for instance, I argue that Tarantino’s attention to a critical discussion about the representation of gender in Reservoir Dog and Pulp Fiction helps us understand why a series of empowering female characters became the protagonists of his next three films (Jackie Brown, Kill Bill , Death Proof ). Equally useful is noticing that this ‘trilogy’ was followed by, and partially overlapped with, another one that developed the same themes from a new perspective: Kill Bill , Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds . These three films, in fact, explicitly built on Clover’s psychoanalytical interpretation of the horror film and the cinematic experience more broadly, engaging with the analysis of the revenge narrative at the centre of Men, Women and Chain Saws. Tarantino’s entire filmography, perhaps, could be divided into two parts, which would dialectically relate to each other. The first—including Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and Death Proof —apparently ignored ‘real’ historical events to focus on purely cinematic worlds. The second—including Inglourious Basterds , Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood—directly dealt with History, addressing major political conflicts such as World War II, the Civil War and the legacy of slavery in the United States. My point, here, is to suggest that to appreciate the cultural and historical significance of Tarantino’s films, and of other examples of ‘late’ postmodern cinema, it is necessary to take a detour through theory.19 Tarantino’s films require their viewers to experience, on a sensory as well as intellectual level, the tension between cinema’s ability to elicit their visceral reaction and its power to provoke, at the same time, uncertainty about the nature of such enjoyment. These films, therefore, make the spectators think about the juxtaposition of highly aestheticised sounds and images with the multiple thematic layers created by their complex

24

F. PAGELLO

style, narratives and characters. The attempt to articulate such a discourse guided the writing of the four chapters of this book, weaving together the ideas of scholars and theorists about postmodern cinema, the critical reception of Tarantino’s films, and my own discussion of what the films make us see, hear and think. Whether this work has succeeded in its intention is entirely for the reader to decide, and it might depend on her willingness to take a little dialectical detour into film theory and aesthetics.

Notes 1. See Baudrillard (1983, 1994, 2002) and Jameson (1979, 1982, 1990, 1992). 2. Because of my focus on the relationship between Tarantino’s writing and direction, in this book I won’t deal with the films for which he only contributed through his screenplays (Tony Scott’s True Romance, 1993; Oliver Stone’ Natural Born Killers , 1994; and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn, 1996). 3. It is also for this focus on cinema that I won’t make any reference in this work to the three TV episodes written and/or directed by Tarantino (‘Motherhood,’ ER, s01e24, 1995; ‘Grave Danger’, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations , s05e24-25, 2006). 4. It is interesting to notice here how in the last few years many observers have looked at the present technological transformation as the sign of the beginnings of a Forth Industrial Revolution. As Jameson’s theory of realism, modernism and postmodernism closely followed Mandel’s linking of the stages of capitalism to the impact of the three previous industrial revolutions, it is possible that the analysis of these developments might lead scholars to better identify the characteristics of a new, emerging ‘cultural logic.’ 5. The outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic in Spring 2020 (when this book had already been completed) cannot but reinforce this feeling that a historical phase is finally coming to an end, and a new one will soon emerge. 6. What Matthew Flisfeder wrote about Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘capitalist realism’ in his book Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner might be useful in this respect: ‘Though I find much value in the way that Fisher theorizes the present as ‘Capitalist realism,’ the concept itself seems to signal something of the centrality of the postmodern. It is postmodernism to the extreme. The feeling that there is no alternative to the global culture of capitalism is brought forth by postmodernism. Just as critics of the postmodern saw it as a new extension of late modern culture, I see ‘capitalist realism’ as the final stage of the postmodern: late postmodernism,

1

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

INTRODUCTION

25

perhaps’ (Flisfeder 2017: 18). This perspective, while going in a different, almost opposed, direction, is actually linked to my own, as they highlight two sides of the same phenomenon: a new (terminal?) phase in the development of postmodern culture and society. In Post-Theory Jameson is mentioned as one of the main representatives of the culturalist field, insofar he is placed in the area of postmodern theory, one of the main three trends in culturalist Film Studies according to Bordwell and Carroll (1996: XIV, 9, 19.). In the same collection, a chapter written by Michael Walsh (‘Jameson and Global Aesthetics’) offers a rather critical evaluation of Jameson’s work. The fact that only a few scholarly monographs about Tarantino’s cinema have been published in English is quite a surprising fact, which can possibly only be explained by the (exaggerated) suspicions of contemporary Film Studies towards any work that could be ‘accused’ of auteurism. Before the present work, only four book-length, scholarly studied had been published (Gallafent 2006; Barlow 2010; Nama 2015; Roche 2018). In this context, Dassanowsky’s and Speck’s edited collections on Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained provided some welcome contributions. However, the fact that these works mostly involved scholars working in Communication, History or German Studies, rather than in Film Studies, seem to confirm what said above. It is interesting to notice that Roche never refers of Tarantino’s cinema as ‘postmodern.’ This is a rather curious fact, not only because the centrality of this notion in the scholarly reception of Tarantino and, indeed, in the very critical debates about postmodern cinema as such. Even more crucial is that Roche builds extensively on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, which became the main competitor of Jameson’s work in the definition of postmodern culture in film, literary and cultural studies. This remarkable silence clearly indicates the decline of postmodernism as a theoretical framework. Ed Gallafent’s 2006 and Aaron Barlow’s 2010 books dealt respectively with the first four and the first six films by Tarantino. In addition, it interesting to mention here Fred Botting and Scott Wilson’s The Tarantinian Ethics (2001), which offers an unusual and in-depth analysis of Tarantino’s early screenplays through a rather sophisticate Lacanian framework, as well as Simona Brancati’s (2014), which, however, mostly relied on (Italian) critical literature that do not always sustain its discourse with a solid theoretical background. Tarantino’s much-discussed experience as a clerk for a video-store in Los Angeles has always been linked to the—crucial—issue of his cinephilia and, specifically, his supposedly unconditional love for any kinds of films, which would neglect to elaborate any historical, cultural or aesthetic discrimination among them. In this sense, the video-store has become for many

26

F. PAGELLO

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

critics the perfect embodiment for Tarantino’s allegedly playful as much as nihilistic approach. And, yet, Tarantino’s own self-description as videostore clerk and cinephile reveals a much more sophisticate form of film criticism, based on a careful—even if admittedly subjective—process of selection and evaluation (see for instance Sauvage 2013: 30–38). In his 1975 article about Dog Day Afternoon, Jameson had already started to develop his approach to mass culture in general, and genre cinema in particular. As noticed in Chapter 4, it is important to stress that this emphasis of this conception of subjectivity is applied by Žižek not only to the films that he analyses, but to film theory itself. The consequences of this approach are of course controversial, as they are precisely those that Bordwell and Carroll criticised in their attack on (post)modernist theory: in Bordwell’s and Carroll’s view, an approach such as Žižek’s leads to the impossibility for film theory to follow the standards required by contemporary scientific research (see infra, pp. 131–135). From this perspective, Žižek’s work has inspired scholars such as Todd McGowan (McGowan and Kunkle 2004; McGowan 2007a, b, 2012), Fabio Vighi (2014), and Matthew Flisfeder (2012), which expanded on his work on filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Lynch or Nolan. The numerous biographies devoted to Tarantino often emphasised on this aspect. See, for example Clarkson (1995, pp. 63–66). See, for instance, Célia Sauvage’s interesting discussion of these aspects of Tarantino’s activity, commenting in particular on his participation in the curation of the DVD series entitled ‘Rolling Thunder Pictures’ and ‘Dragon Dynastys’, created by Miramax between 1995 and the late 2000s (Sauvage 2013: 21–25). See the interview given to the Pure Cinema Podcast, also available on the website of Tarantino-owned film theatre New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, of which he curates the programming. Also interesting in this context are Tarantino’s frequent mentions to the experience acquired through the organisation of the ‘QT festival,’ which he held in Austin between 1997 and 2007. Interview available at: http://thenewbev.com/blog/2019/07/pure-cinemapodcast-july-2019-with-quentin-tarantino/. Last accessed on July 6, 2020. ‘Even though I quit school when I was in junior high, I’m an academic at heart, and my study is cinema. I’ve been writing a movie review book over the years, and I’m not in any hurry to finish it. I started writing the book because it wasn’t enough that I was just seeing movies – they were being lost to the atmosphere. It’s like my whole life I’m studying for a professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I

1

INTRODUCTION

27

graduate’ (Peary 2013: 160). Along the same lines, see also an interview published by Filmmaker’s Magazine in February 2010: ‘Right now I’m on a Dorothy Arzner thing, reading a book about her life and her movies. I watched Dance, Girl, Dance, which I really liked. I’m making notes, and maybe I’ll write a piece about her. And maybe I’ll publish it sometime, or maybe I’ll do it just for myself. That’s kind of what I do in my life — this director, this actor, this movement, this genre, this subgenre, this style, this period of time, this country’s cinema, will just grab me for some reason all of a sudden. And then I explore it, take it in and absorb it, make notes about it so it stays. It’s just like being a student. A lifelong student.’ The interview is available at the following address: https://filmmakermagazine.com/4712-a-night-at-themovies-quentin-tarantinos-inglourious-basterds-by-scott-macaulay/. Last accessed on July 6, 2020. 19. As is well known, ‘detour through theory’ is an expression used by Stuart Hall (2016). The Althusserian (i.e. anti-Hegelian) matrix of Hall’s conceptual framework is also well known and led to the rather contradictory relationship between Cultural Studies and the dialectical theory proposed by authors such as Jameson and Žižek. It is important to remember, however, that Hall’s approach was shaped by the theory of ideology of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, two of the main Marxist thinkers to focus on the connections between culture and politics by adopting a thoroughly dialectical perspective. It is no coincidence that Hall’s original quote from his 1983 lectures reads as a precise summary of a Marxist’s approach to Hegel’s dialectics: ‘historical understanding always involves a detour through theory; it involves moving from the empirical to the abstraction and then returning to the concrete’ (Hall 1983: 89). It seems to me that this can be taken as a solid basis to highlight, rather than a simple opposition, the (once again, dialectical) relationships among authors as diverse as Hall, Jameson and Žižek.

References Barlow, Aaron. 2010. Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotexte. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. London: Verso. Baumbach, Nico, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. 2016. Revisiting PostModernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson. Social Text 34 (2): 143–160.

28

F. PAGELLO

Booker, M. Keith. 2007. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Cinema and Why It Makes Us Fell So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll (eds.). 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. 2001. The Tarantinian Ethics. London: Sage. Brancati, Simona. 2014. Cinema Unchained: The Films of Quentin Tarantino. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Brooker, Peter, and Will Brooker. 1996. Pulpmodernism: Tarantino’s Affirmative Action. In Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the Literature Media Divide, ed. Deborah Cartmell, et al. London: Pluto Press. Clarkson, Wensley. 1995. Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip. London: Piatkus. Clover, Carol. 1992. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: British Film Institute. Constable, Catherine. 2015. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics. New York: Wallflower. Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda (eds.). 2016. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21stCentury Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books. Duncan, Pansy. 2016. The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other. New York and London: Routledge. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2012. The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2017. Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gallafent, Edward (ed.). 2006. Quentin Tarantino. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Gaudréault, André, and Philippe Marion. 2015. The End of Cinema: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Hagener, Malte, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier (eds.). 2016. The State of Post-Cinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the Age of Digital Dissemination. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 2002. Postmodern Afterthoughts. Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 37 (1): 5–12. Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture. Social Text 1: 130–148. Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto.

1

INTRODUCTION

29

Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Foreword. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, ed. Jean-François Lyotard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. New York: Verso. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1992. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence (1982–1985). London: Turnaround. Malavasi, Luca. 2017. Postmoderno e cinema. Roma: Carocci. McGowan, Todd. 2007a. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press. McGowan, Todd. 2007b. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press. McGowan, Todd. 2012. The Fictional Christopher Nolan. Austin, TX: Texas University Press. McGowan, Todd, and Sheila Kunkle (eds.). 2004. Lacan and Contemporary Theory. New York: Other Press. Nama, Adilifu. 2015. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin: Texas University Press. Peary, Gary. 2013. Quentin Tarantino: Interviews. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press. Peth˝ o, Ágnes. 2012. Film in the Post-Media Age. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Polan, Dana. 2000. Pulp Fiction. London: British Film Institute. Polan, Dana. 2009. The Sopranos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roche, David. 2018. Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Rodowick, David N. 2015. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sauvage, Célia. 2013. Critiquer Quentin Tarantino est-il raisonnable? Paris: J. Vrin. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Ropley: Zero. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Torres Cruz, Décio. 2014. Postmodern Metanarratives: Blade Runner and Literature in the Age of Image. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Toth, Josh. 2010. The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

30

F. PAGELLO

van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen. 2017. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Vighi, Fabio. 2014. Critical Theory and Film: Rethinking Ideology Through Film Noir. New York: Continuum. von Dassanowsky, Robert (ed.). 2012. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema. London and New York: Continuum. Wright, Neelham Sidhart. 2017. Bollywood and Postmodernism: Popular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: An Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie´slowski Between Theory and Post-Theory. London: British Film Institute. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London and New York: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

Beyond Postmodernism

Approximately sixteen minutes into Pulp Fiction, the two hitmen, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta), are finally facing the group of young men they were sent to kill. Shortly after the beginning of their conversation, a fifteen-second sequence of four (almost completely silent) shots offers the following images to the viewer: 1. An extreme close-up of Jules looking down and then up, at the person in front of him; 2. The extreme close-up of a burger, and of Jules’s hand picking it up; 3. A close-up of one of the young men, looking back at Jules; 4. Another extreme close-up of Jules biting and chewing the burger, making a sound of satisfaction and ultimately declaring: ‘This is a tasty burger, Vincent!’ In what follows, Jules addresses both his partner and the young men, first recommending that Vincent try this specific brand of burgers, and then discussing his tastes in the field, his girlfriend’s vegetarian diet and what a Big Mac is called in France. Only after this long digression will Jules expose the reason why he and Vincent have been sent there, before proceeding with the execution. The whole sequence, an often quoted and much analysed scene from Tarantino’s second and most famous movie, can be seen as exemplary

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7_2

31

32

F. PAGELLO

of the director’s way of structuring most of his sequences, which immediately reveal the lasting impact of Sergio Leone’s westerns on his style: long, slow-paced scenes with extended, witty dialogues, often interspersed with such moments of ‘contemplative’ suspension of the action, quickly followed by abrupt explosions of violence. It is on those three particular shots, however, that I will now focus to indicate a few key features of Tarantino’s approach to film aesthetics: 1. The use of extreme close-ups and a particular treatment of the film, light and colours bring the viewer in near contact with the fictional world, eliciting a heightened perception of the objects represented on the screen. 2. The attention to the characters’ gaze and its direction highlights how the representation of the fictional world is anchored to specific points of view internal to the diegesis. The viewer does therefore experience the narrative on screen through a set of particular perspectives, which necessarily provoke specific affective and cognitive reactions in the audience. 3. The blatant aestheticisation of these images—particularly that of the burger, so obviously reminiscent of advertising language—refers to a mediatised universe in which everything is experienced as a fetishised commodity. 4. Despite the link to this familiar commercial imagery, Tarantino’s visual style never exactly coincides with that of most images to be found in contemporary popular culture. The specific type of film, the framing, the editing, the lightning, the colours and the soundtrack are ostensibly different from that of television or advertising and even from the majority of recent Hollywood cinema. In fact, as opposed to the dominant alleged dematerialisation of the video and digital image, Tarantino’s shots stress the materiality of the film as much as that of the profilmic. In those four shots in Pulp Fiction, for example, the images of the actors and the objects appear as dense, sensory entities right in front of the viewer. The colours seem to emerge like heavy strokes of paint on top of the screen. The light on the skin of the Samuel L. Jackson makes visible the tension between the characters. The apparent thickness of the plasticky cheese dripping out of the burger materialises the suspense of the

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

33

scene. While it might be difficult to decide whether these images have any specific ‘meaning,’ or even a real narrative motivation, they surely appear to the viewer as concrete objects in themselves. Through their very sensory appearance and its effect on the viewer, these images thus literally ‘make sense.’ The image of the burger in Pulp Fiction is not of the same order as the supposed hyperreal imagery of postmodern culture. In this latter, the confusion between the real and the imaginary derives from the paradoxical move by which both the materiality of the image and that of the objects represented tend to hide themselves. The ‘real’ world seems to disappear because of the attempt to efface the tension between the image as an object and the object of the image, ultimately threatening their respective identities. But the images found in Tarantino’s cinema do not serve this logic. Quite to the contrary, they present themselves as the absorbing representation of convincing fictional worlds as well as the sum of the sensory qualities of the camera work itself. The images do not eliminate the tension between themselves and what they ‘represent’, making both sides equally relevant in the eyes and to the mind the viewer. The more visible the style becomes, the more it succeeds in making the viewer feel as if she were almost able to touch the world on the screen. Tarantino’s blatant aestheticisation of his shots, moreover, never works against the staging of complex and sustained networks of characters with whom the viewer is prompted to empathise, and which are linked to the representation of highly dramatic events on whose possible ethical and political meanings critics and audiences have lively speculated for more than 25 years. In the scene discussed above, for example, the relationships among the characters on screen generate a number of narrative and emotional expectations, which feed into the increasing suspense of the sequence. Moreover, the events occurring in this early section of the film will reverberate throughout its duration, highlighting the centrality of the parallel stories of Jules and Vincent. One of the main narrative threads of Pulp Fiction is in fact the gradual parting ways of these two characters: their appearance as partners in the beginning of the film makes the story of their opposite destinies even more relevant for the viewers. The theme of Jules’ ‘redemption’ as opposed to Vincent’s tragicomic demise has been often discussed by critics, fans and scholars, debating whether it should be taken seriously or be seen as the ultimate proof of Tarantino’s postmodernist, nihilist irony (see infra, pp. 108–109, 116–117, 160).

34

F. PAGELLO

This is the judgement with which most of Tarantino’s films to date have been regularly charged. Over the years, many critics have argued that Tarantino’s cinema can be seen as a perfect example of nihilistic postmodern culture, replacing the real world with hyperreal simulations. Films such as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Death Proof are indeed constantly indicated by Tarantino’s detractors as examples of the director’s selfreflexivity and narcissism, if not of the emptiness of postmodern cinema as a whole. As we have seen above, the charge of aestheticisation is not entirely misplaced. But what such critical accounts miss is that Tarantino’s aestheticization of film style never supersedes—or reduces—his ability to give shape to habitable worlds, intriguing characters and dramatic events through the use of cinematic techniques that affect in the viewer. What this chapter and this book intend to claim is that the core of Tarantino’s aesthetics lies precisely in the tension between aestheticisation and narrative. This is nothing particularly new. Some of the filmmakers most often cited by Tarantino as his models are Sergio Leone, Jean-Pierre Melville and Brian De Palma, all of which had adopted a rather similar approach in the 1960s or the 1970s. To stress only the aspect of aestheticisation would be to overlook the very operation all these filmmakers were trying to accomplish. Such a reaction, in fact, is also not new, as similar arguments were used during the 1970s and the 1980s to reject many films directed by De Palma. And before then, the same response greeted for a long period even De Palma’s acknowledge model: Alfred Hitchcock.1 The politique des auteurs was of course instrumental in spectacularly reversing this negative judgement (or prejudice), making visible how Hitchcock’s cinema was much more than an aestheticized and commercially driven use of film language. And, the same operation was carried out for two other inspirations for Tarantino: Howard Hawks (who, together with Leone, is probably the single auteur most celebrated by Tarantino) and Sam Fuller (to whose memory Pulp Fiction was dedicated). As is well known, this was the single, most important innovation introduced by the politique des auteurs: the ability to show how Hollywood directors contributed to the creation of new film forms by the sheer force of their mise en scène, while they were working from within the language of classical film and at the centre of the film industry. The critics and future filmmakers of the Cahiers du Cinéma were able to show how Hitchcock’s and Hawk’s thrillers, Westerns and comedies were the source of a new aesthetic experience, and how this meant that any clear-cut opposition between aesthetics and aestheticisation, or art and entertainment, had been abolished. And

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

35

at the forefront of these new critics stood Godard, another acknowledged inspiration of the young Tarantino, and one of four filmmakers to which Reservoir Dogs was dedicated.2 It is for this reason that this book starts its investigation of contemporary film theory with the work of a French philosopher who, in his own way, theorizes and historicizes cinematic aesthetics in relation to the logic of art during the last three centuries.3 For Jacques Rancière, in fact, the dissolution of all hierarchies in the field of art is the essential feature of modern aesthetics as such. Art and non-art, where ‘non-art’ also refers to the everyday, commercialised use of aestheticised images, cannot be thought as inherently opposed to each other. And, for him, cinema is the proof that in contemporary culture art and aesthetics can coexist, and are often superimposed, with entertainment and aestheticisation. This chapter is divided into three sections. Section 1 explores Rancière’s rejection of contemporary claims about the death of aesthetics at the hands of postmodernism, mass culture and aestheticisation. Rancière refuses the very idea of a postmodern rupture, as he highlights how this process started in the eighteenth century. Building on this, I suggest that Rancière’s notion of aesthetics helps reveal the way Tarantino’s filmmaking asserts cinema’s enduring aesthetic value. Section 2 discusses Rancière’s notion of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ and the place of cinema within it.4 I propose that Rancière’s discourse about these topics helps shed light on Tarantino’s work, because it shows how cinema’s aesthetic nature consists in its constant oscillation between art and entertainment, narrative development and suspension of action, and that cinema is often at its best when it embraces a highly aestheticised style. Finally, I look at Tarantino’s debut film, Reservoir Dogs and particularly its first few sequences, analysing them through the theoretical framework sketched out in the rest of the chapter. One of the objectives of this final section is to show how since his earliest film, Tarantino’s work has challenged all claims about the death of art cinema, or its complete transformation in a purely commercial machine, showing them to be the effect of an unnecessarily melancholic approach towards the place of the aesthetic in contemporary culture.

36

F. PAGELLO

1

Rancière’s Aesthetic Theory

Postmodernism and the Politics of Aesthetics Rancière’s writings on the arts consist of an extended defence, as well as an important reassessing of a somewhat traditional notion of aesthetics, whose original formulation he traces back to the late eighteenth century, indicating Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) as one of its foundational theoretical works.5 Rancière’s main claim is that aesthetics has an intrinsic (meta)political value, which is expressed through art’s radically emancipatory ability to disrupt the homogeneous way in which in the realm of the sensible is ‘distributed’ within a certain society.6 Therefore, Rancière’s intervention in this field has a two-fold objective: to reaffirm the radical emancipatory power of art, and to locate this power in its pure aesthetic qualities. Hence his insistence on a specific politics of aesthetics rather than on the way in which art can serve as a certain politics, as well as instead of a direct superimposition of art and politics.7 It is significant for my discourse that Rancière’s specific argument was explicitly developed as a reaction to the numerous announcements about, as well as or denunciation of, the decline of aesthetics and its political value that multiplied in the last decades of the twentieth century,8 and it is also a punctual response to the plethora of postmodern(ist) thinkers that have variously denied or strongly limited the political value of art in contemporary culture.9 His texts, for instance, have vehemently dismissed any declarations about the ‘death of the image’ by critics such as Regis Debray,10 and have extensively engaged with Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics, claiming that they end up exchanging art’s political power for a more pacifying ethical value.11 In this section I will try to show how Rancière’s critical view of postmodernism informs my reassessment of both those theoretical frameworks that affirm that Tarantino’s cinema cannot have any critical value, and those which valorise them through what the French philosopher calls ‘micro-politics.’12 In fact, Rancière’s specific analysis of the dialectics between these two tendencies at the core of postmodern culture will be central in my own discourse. In addition, I will build on Rancière’s specific understanding of postmodernism and its relationship to modernism.13 From this perspective, the issue is not only the fact that postmodernism threw the baby of modern utopias out with the bathwater of their specific ideological context; more crucially, the point is to

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

37

understand the impossibility for postmodernism to bypass the problematics posed by modernism as the expression of the logic of art in what Rancière calls the ‘aesthetic regime.’ To better understand the limits of all postmodernist approaches, therefore, we need to start from Rancière’s interpretation of modernism’s fundamental move (Rancière 2007). This consisted of the most radical affirmation of the possibility of fully realising the fusion of life and art that, for Rancière, has represented the key feature of Western aesthetics for the last two centuries. In this sense, modernism was arguably the clearest affirmation of the intrinsic political nature of all art in the post-Enlightenment period, and most certainly one of the best examples of how the relationship between art and politics is based on a specific conceptualisation of art’s aesthetic qualities, rather than its use as a medium to convey political ideas or a means to represent political situations. Crucially, Rancière identifies two opposite ways in which modernist art has affirmed this idea. On the one hand, a variety of theorists and artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century proclaimed that art would be able to exist and transform human existence without any external justification, and that this autonomy would be the expression of its deepest, political value. The slogan ‘art’s for art’s sake,’ as Rancière explains in many of his works (Rancière 2007, 2013, 2014), should be interpreted not as a regression into the world of beautiful artefacts that have nothing to do with ‘real’ life, but as the exact opposite: the affirmation of the absolute reality of art against all discourses denouncing its irrelevancy—most frequently with the explicit or implicitly goal of submitting it to their specific political perspective. On the other hand, avant-garde artists and philosophers proclaimed that art could be turned into life, as the separation between them was in fact artificial, alienating and historically outmoded. Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism are two of Rancière’s common examples of this tendency, as both of these artistic movements proclaimed, as the strongest aesthetic and political act, the objective of abolishing art’s autonomous sphere and embracing the increasing aestheticisation of everyday life (Rancière 2007: 19–22). In the works and the thought of these artists and theorists, life in modern society embodied the highest ideals of aesthetics, and for this reason the work of the artist could be seen as a direct political act. It is no coincidence that ‘for a brief moment (the revolutionary 1910s and 1920s)’ these two, apparently, opposed tendencies could be seen as

38

F. PAGELLO

converging (Rancière 2007: 19–22). In that particular historical context, modern art could be seen as aligning with radical political regimes on the Left as well as on the Right, concretely giving artists the opportunity to put their work in the service of new societies in which the aestheticisation of everyday life had immediate political—even revolutionary—consequences. It is clear that the history and philosophy of the twentieth century has gone to great lengths to prove that the utopian expectations in the political power of modernist art were fully maintained. The multiple cases in which avant-garde was linked to totalitarian impulses would be later matched by the full emergence of mass culture and the culture industries, which modernism itself took as one of its main polemical targets and which explains why postmodernism is best understood as an attempt to come to terms with politically catastrophic or entirely commercially driven examples of the conflation of art, politics and everyday life. While many theorists of postmodernism have tried to address this predicament, often with the goal of finding new ways to reaffirm the political power of art, Rancière’s argues that postmodernism as a whole shows a fundamentally melancholic tone. On the one hand, thinkers such as Baudrillard have affirmed that the utopian, avant-garde dream of realising the fusion between art, life and politics resulted in the final abolition of aesthetics as such. As with the propaganda art in earlier totalitarian regimes, the contemporary society of spectacle could be considered the expression of an immediate (and complete) identification of aesthetics with communication and/or political power. Art, in that case, would not be an instrument of political emancipation any longer, because aesthetics would have been completely replaced by aestheticisation. It is clear that, from Rancière’s perspective, this argument underestimates the fact that the aestheticisation of life was already at the core of the politics of aesthetics for more than two hundred years, and that the emphasis on this particular aspect guided some of the most radical expressions of modernism. Such postmodernist condemnations of the aestheticisation of life should therefore be understood as a consequence of the disillusionment with modernism but should not be embraced as a solid argument to dismiss art’s political value. On the other hand, many postmodern thinkers and artists appear to believe that since modernism failed in its attempt to affirm the emancipatory power of art, it would be possible as well as necessary to reverse its conflation of aesthetics and politics in order to save art’s radical power.

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

39

This postmodernist revision of avant-garde resistance to aestheticisation would thus be able to preserve some radical potential of aesthetics, since art would stand against the dominant way of life. For Rancière’s, however, this approach also implies that aesthetics should abandon the proper terrain of politics, thus becoming a purely ethical discourse that focuses on the mourning for the end of utopian art as well as the decadence of contemporary life.14 This is the reason why, for Rancière, a melancholic tone inevitably marks the whole of postmodern theory, even when it most forcefully tries to counter the disillusionment provoked by the fading of modernist aesthetics: The metapolitics of the resistant form tends to oscillate between two positions. On the one hand, it assimilates this resistance with the struggle to preserve the material difference of art apart from all the worldly affairs that compromise it: the commerce of mass exhibitions and cultural products by which it becomes a profit-making industrial enterprise; the pedagogy aiming to bring art closer to the social groups to whom it is foreign; and attempts to integrate art into a ‘culture’, further divided into various social, ethnic or sexual group cultures (…) This denunciation can easily be incorporated into political attitudes that demand to re-establish a republican-style education to counter the democratic dissolution of forms of knowledge, behaviours and values. And it passes an overall negative judgement on contemporary restlessness, preoccupied with blurring the boundaries between art and life, signs and things. But, at the same time, this jealously guarded art tends to become a mere testimony to the power of the Other and the risk of catastrophe continuously run by forgetting it. The trailblazers of the avant-garde become the sentinel that watches over the victims and keeps the memory of catastrophe alive. Here again, the politics of the resistant form accomplishes itself at the exact moment that it is cancelled out. It does so, no longer as part of a metapolitics of revolution of the sensory world, but by identifying the work of art with the ethical task of bearing witness, cancelling out, once again, both art and politics. This ethical dissolution of aesthetic heterogeneity goes hand-in-hand with a whole current of contemporary thought in which political dissensuality is dissolved into an archipolitics of the exception and in which all forms of domination, or of emancipation, are reduced to the global nature of an ontological catastrophe from which only a God can save us (‘Aesthetics as politics’, Rancière 2014: 42–43).

40

F. PAGELLO

Rancière, Postmodernism and Tarantino’s Cinematic Aesthetics From Rancière’s perspective, it is thus clear why the postmodernist abandonment of art’s radical emancipatory power does not indicate a lucid response and even less a radical rupture with the predicament that twentieth-century art has constantly faced. Quite to the contrary, they are the clearest symptoms that postmodernism repeats, in an inverted form, the same dialectics that modernism had experienced before it (which is hardly surprising, given that postmodernism is—literally—a reactionary phenomenon, responding to the crisis of modernism’s utopias).15 It is important to clarify here that Rancière’s rejection of postmodern theory on the ground of its proximity to modernism should not be misunderstood as another anti-modernist (and, therefore, another postmodernist) argument. For Rancière, in fact, it is the very opposition between modernism and postmodernism which is misleading, since it is necessary to understand them as two aspects of one broader phenomenon, what he calls the ‘aesthetic regime of art’: the notions of modernity and postmodernity misguidedly project, in the form of temporal succession, antagonistic elements whose tension infuses and animates the aesthetic regime of art in its entirety. This regime has always lived off the tension between contraries. The autonomy of aesthetic experience, which founds the idea of Art qua autonomous reality, is here accompanied by the elimination of all pragmatic criteria for extricating the domain of art from that of non-art, the solitude of the work from the forms of collective life. There is no postmodern rupture. But there is a dialectic of the ‘apolitically political’ work. And there is a limit at which its very project cancels itself out. (‘Aesthetics as Politics,’ Rancière 2014: 42)

Before exploring in more detail the way Rancière conceptualises the aesthetic regime, however, I will briefly discuss how his conception of postmodernism allows me to reject or reassess the postmodern critical approaches to Tarantino’s cinema that were mentioned in the ‘Introduction,’ and which will be often discussed throughout this book. The dismissal of Tarantino’s films as an expression of the aestheticisation of life under late capitalism can be fully rejected by building on Rancière’s emphasis on the inherent emancipatory logic of this move, as well as on his insistence of its pre-postmodern origin. Against critics who draw on Baudrillard’s (and, partially, Jameson’s) critical theory, I

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

41

will argue that their denunciation of Tarantino’s films as a ‘Disneyfication’ of cinema (see infra, pp. 9–10, 106) betrays a conservative ideology that argues for maintaining an artificial distinction between art and life. I believe Rancière’s work can support my argument in two ways. On the one hand, it permits me to discard such judgements by claiming that Tarantino’s cinema repeats the fundamental move of all modern art that consists of eliminating any simplistic opposition between art and life. The aestheticised style of the filmmaker cannot thus be accused of erasing cinema’s aesthetic and political value simply because it resembles that of ‘commercial’ movies. Quite to the contrary, such value can be found in this exact place, in their refusal to accept any preordained hierarchy of form or content that would be available to aesthetic cinema. On the other hand, Rancière’s analysis of the affirmation autonomy of modern art (e.g. the ‘art’s for art’s sake’ slogan) as one of the (contradictory) expressions of the politics of aesthetics acknowledges that the emphasis on the purely aesthetic qualities of a work of art does not imply any repudiation of its ability to support a radical redistribution of the sensible. In this sense, Tarantino’s focus on cinema itself through to the endless citation of film history as well as his foregrounding of its own mechanism does not have to be read as reducing its power to the production of an (alternative) hyperreality. In this sense, the very fact that cinema itself can ‘take the place’ of real life—both inside and outside the film—should be seen instead as the radical affirmation of its power to act within this reality. Rancière’s treatment of Lyotard’s aesthetics can also help us with better evaluating the efforts of those scholars that have defended Tarantino’s cinema drawing on postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, cultural studies or neo-formalism (see infra, pp. 11, 79–81, 123, 203). The long quote included above offers a rather complete, albeit succinct, summary of Rancière’s rather tepid evaluation of such perspectives. On the one hand, I will argue that an excessive emphasis on the ‘resistant’ value that can be in the formal, metafictional as well as narrative aspects of Tarantino’s films might lead one to reinstate a too radical distinction between his work and the rest of contemporary cinema. In order to best appreciate the real value of Tarantino’s cinema, instead, one should first of all focus on its specific ability to disrupt established cultural and aesthetic hierarchies—the separation between art and commercial cinema, the prefixed combination of specific styles and registers with specific subject, the distinction between different genres, authors and national schools—rather than try to offer analyses of how its self-reflexive formal processes elevate it from other types of audiovisual culture.

42

F. PAGELLO

On the other hand, Rancière passionately refuses to exchange art’s political potential for the (Lyotardian) role as the reminder of the unreachable, irrepresentable Other or, worse, as the witness to the catastrophes that actual politics appears unable to address. As clearly stated in the closing line of the passage quoted above, this approach would amount to abandoning the terrains of politics and aesthetics altogether to end, instead, in the domain of ethics. Politics would indeed lose its ability to create dissensus, as its role would be that of supporting the solidarity of the whole community through those exceptional moments in which its consensual structure is shattered by an external force. Aesthetics, in turn, would be deprived of its own real political powers, which lie in the ability to transform society by contesting the limits and the hierarchies that structure the field of perception. In relation to Tarantino, this discourse can help us avoid the temptation of offering readings of his cinema as an apolitical, and yet, ‘ethical’ reminder of the always-impending, and always already-happened, (post)modern catastrophes that brush away all utopias of political emancipation. In this sense, I will claim instead that Tarantino’s films incessantly confront the viewer with the disturbing vision of an Other that forces her to experience the dimension of intercommunity dissensus, and thus of politics, rather than offering the audience the opportunity to withdraw into a more comfortable ethical posture.

2 From Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime to Tarantino’s Cinema The reason why Rancière’s notion of an ‘aesthetic regime of art’ is inherently incompatible with the conception of aesthetics proper to postmodernism is that it establishes an indissoluble connection between late twentieth-century art and a broader historical context. The birth of the aesthetic regime, in fact, would go back to the very roots of political modernity, when a new conception of art and the beautiful took shape, first, in the context of Enlightenment thinking (for instance, through the Kantian idea of the Sublime16 and the aesthetic theories of Winckelmann, Diderot and Rousseau)17 and later in the philosophy that immediately followed the event of the French Revolution (in particular in Schiller’s18 and Hegel’s aesthetics).19 This historicisation institutes a direct link between the radically emancipatory ideas of these thinkers and a new conception of art’s power. As the Enlightenment and German

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

43

Idealism dissolved the foundation of the ancien regime, so aesthetics (a word coined in its modern meaning in 1735, in Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus ) should be seen as the corrosion of the theories and practices of art that had dominated in the previous era. To understand Rancière’s idea of the aesthetic regime, it is necessary to look at his periodisation of the history of art and its philosophical understanding. For Rancière, it is possible to distinguish three different regimes: the ethical, the representational and the aesthetic. In each of them, art occupies a radically different position in the social fabric and its cultural structure. The first and oldest regime is associated with Plato’s negative conception of mimesis. In the ‘ethical regime,’ an image (as well as any literary or theatrical work) could only be considered as an image of something else, that is, as an imperfect copy of the idea or the things it represented. For this reason, in this context it would not be possible to properly speak of artistic images but only of ‘images that are judged in terms of their intrinsic truth and of their impact on the ways of being of individuals and of the collectivity’ (‘Aesthetics as Politics,’ Rancière 2014: 28). The idea of a legitimate status and a specific field devoted to artistic creation is the product of a certain historical and cultural moment. The ‘mimetic regime’ sees its beginnings only with Aristotle’s philosophy and dominates Western culture until the eighteenth century. The new conception of artistic creation was based on the affirmation of the distinctive and positive dimension of representation, which liberated the image from its relationship to ethics and truth, as well as any explicit dependence on political power. Images could be now enjoyed without having to judge them against their perfect (or necessarily imperfect) relationship with Truth and the Good. At the same time however, this regime imposes a strict limitation on the arrangement of images, words and sounds in order to qualify as parts of the field of the arts. For Rancière, the mimetic regime is in fact based on two main principles. First of all, any work of art imposes a certain form (which is explicitly conceived of as an active force) on a specific matter (which is explicitly conceived of as a passive recipient of form’s action). Secondly, the work of art is necessarily the representation of something: the artistic process thus consists in the production of a ‘plausible appearance’ combining an idea with its proper apparition in the realm of the sensible. A series of hierarchies related to both the form and the content (and, crucially, to

44

F. PAGELLO

their relationship) is therefore right at the core of this perspective. For Rancière the imposition of these hierarchies determines the inner link between aesthetic and political domination that would survive until the collapse of the ancient regime: Enlightenment thinking, the French Revolution, the crisis of (Neo-) Classicism and German Idealism would all be the affirmation of radical universal equality through philosophy, politics as well as art. The aesthetic regime coincides with the radical abolition of any systems of rules designed to assign a specific place to things, aesthetic objects and political subjects, which is why all of modern art should be understood as the end of the stable separation between art and life (and, therefore, between art and politics). More specifically, the aesthetic regime explicitly rejects the two principles that were at the basis of the field of the arts during the previous era. On the one hand, form and content cease to be linked through a fixed measure, and particularly through their traditional association with activity and passivity. In the new regime, style becomes passive insofar as it gives up its own set of rules—for instance, those mandating that every play should belong to a certain genre and obey to its specific conventions—in order to let its objects become active, by speaking in their own voice or even by affirming their inability to speak. Flaubert’s quest to write a ‘novel about nothing’ and his concept of style as ‘an absolute way of seeing things’ are among Rancière’s most recurrent examples of this new aesthetic ideal.20 On the other hand, the necessity for the artwork to ‘represent’ any specific ideas, things or events is completely abandoned. And, even more crucially, the obligation to ‘properly’ represent something external ceases to have any inherent relation with the nature of aesthetics. This is indeed the point, in Rancière’s reading, of Schiller’s, Hegel’s, as well as the whole modernist (and proto-modernist) movements’ instance of the ‘autonomy’ of art. In the aesthetic regime, in fact, art becomes something inherently different from other forms of linguistic creation in which the goal is to convey (that is, to represent) a certain meaning or to provide an ‘adequate’ (audio) visual equivalent to an existing object or fact. Quite to the contrary, the aesthetic image is that for which no adequate referent is necessary—or desirable. Explicitly rejecting both the principle of Classicism as well as the everyday uses of the image for communication, illustration and so on, an image becomes ‘art’ when it breaks away from the system of rules that would allow it to acquire a determined meaning

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

45

and/or referent.21 This way, the image acquires a reality in itself, rejecting not only the status of ontological non-existence (and radical falsehood) attributed to it within the ethical regime, but also transgressing the (onto)logical dependence on the existing cultural and political orders that it experienced in the mimetic regime. One additional, but essential, specification must be added at this point. For Rancière, the (alleged) autonomy of art and its inherent questioning of any established aesthetic and political hierarchies does not coincide with a purely formalist or anti-figurative conception of the aesthetic image.22 The key feature of the artistic creation in the aesthetic regime of art consists instead of a process of ‘defiguration.’ As this term indicates, an image can become an aesthetic image not only by refusing representation altogether (as in abstract art) but also, and more importantly, through its ability to reconfigure, and repurpose some material that did initially have a figurative content. Art would maintain, therefore, a certain relationship with representation, but only insofar this latter is ‘suspended’ by the essential aesthetic move of dissolving the ‘necessary’ and ‘fixed’ system of rules that guarantee the correct arrangement of sensory perceptions in a specific work. Since all of modern art would consist in undermining the existing system of representation, Rancière argues that it is impossible to consent to postmodernism’s claim to be at the origin of the dissolution of the barrier between high and low art, art and aestheticisation, and, consequently, between aesthetics and politics: The politics of art in the aesthetics regime of art, or rather its metapolitics, is determined by this funding paradox: in this regime, art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or something other than art. We therefore have no need to contrive any pathetic ends from modernity or imagine that a joyous explosion of postmodernity has put an end to the great modernist adventure of art’s autonomy or of emancipation through art. There is no postmodern rupture. There is a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work. (Rancière 2014: 41)

3

‘Thwarted Fables’

Early in his development of the notion of the ‘aesthetic regime,’ Rancière turned to cinema as to test and verify his rendition of the statue of art throughout the last two or three centuries. A lifelong cinéphile who contributed for years to the aforementioned Cahiers du Cinéma,

46

F. PAGELLO

Rancière’s interventions in this area tend to conflate the act of the filmmaker, the theorist and the film lover as the aforementioned Godard and his colleagues of the French New Wave. Rancière has written extensively about cinema, almost always focusing on single filmmakers or single films to elaborate on his general approach to cinema. In this section, I will focus instead on the ‘Prologue’ to his book Film Fables (Rancière 2014: 1–19), which is arguably the text in which he offers the most encompassing presentation of his view of the place of film art in the context of aesthetic regime. The essay starts with a discussion of whether cinema can be seen as the embodiment of the key elements of the new paradigm because of its technological dimension. From this perspective, the filmic image would automatically dissolve the ethical or representative image by force of its technical reproduction of the moving appearances (and sounds) of things themselves. Like modern painting—but without any effort on the part of the filmmaker—cinema would bring the attention of the viewers to neither the ethical value of the image nor the artist’s ability to imitate the shapes and forms of what the image represents. On the one hand, the production and appearance of the film image embodies the (scientific) rejection of any philosophical indictments about its truth or moral value. Quite on the contrary, film, as photography, leads to a proliferation of images that present themselves as ‘evidences’ of the very existence of their subjects or, alternatively, as artistic manifestations of the deepest meaning of what they represent. On the other hand, the cinematic image would be less the creation of human subjects following a set of cultural rules deciding the proper way to represent a certain theme or referent, than the automatic product of the mechanical apparatus of the camera. From this perspective, it could seem that the very nature of film technology would repeat that process of the becoming ‘passive’ of the author that Rancière indicated as one of the key principles of artistic creation in the aesthetic regime. This first impression, however, is as seducing as it is deceiving. Not only is this discourse is marked by a technological determinism that would conflict with the assumption that aesthetic art is necessarily the result of an active work of de-figuration of the images produced in the everyday.23 And not only would this mean that any ‘specificity’ of cinema would be lost, making it difficult to understand its rather peculiar (and in many respects, blatantly opposed) trajectory in comparison to all other forms of modern art. More crucially, Rancière deems this idea as nostalgic, as it

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

47

leads to identify cinema’s art exclusively with specific types of film—the ‘cinema of attraction,’ the documentary, avant-garde or (post-) modernist experimental cinema—as opposed to ‘commercial,’ narrative cinema. By doing this, the longing for establishing an inherently aesthetic essence for cinema would thus end up reintroducing a specific principle of distinction based on some fixed rules deciding on the forms and content that a film should or should not adopt in order to be considered art. If that was the case, then cinema as such couldn’t become ‘art’ in the specific aesthetic sense in which Rancière has defined the concept. If any type of film can become the object of an aesthetic experience, then its specific relation to the aesthetic regime must reside somewhere else. In fact, Rancière’s essay starts by quoting and engaging at length with the writings of the film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, who in the early 1920s celebrated cinema as a revolutionary art in terms that perfectly match the notion of aesthetic regime: Cinema, by and large, doesn’t do justice to the story. And ‘dramatic action’ here is a mistake. The drama we’re watching is already half-resolved and unfolding on the curative slope to the crisis. The real tragedy is in suspense. It looms over all the face; it is in the curtain and in the door-latch. Each drop of ink can make it blossom at the tip of the pen. It dissolves itself in the glass of water. At every moment, the entire room is saturated with the drama. The cigar burns on the lip of the ashtray like a threat. The dust of betrayal. Poisonous arabesque stretch across the rug and the arm of the seat trembles. For now suffering is in surfusion. Expectation. We can’t see a thing, but the tragic crystal that will turn of to be at the centre of the plots has fallen down somewhere Its wave advances. Concentric circles. It keeps expanding, from relay. Seconds. (Jean Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma, 1921, cited in Rancière 2004: 1)

What is really crucial here is not Epstein’s (apparent) rejection of narrative cinema. His description of cinema’s power, in fact, is not based on the formalistic analysis of an avant-garde, non-narrative film but, rather, on the experience of watching a popular Hollywood movie (Thomas Ince’s 1918 melodrama Honour in His Hous e). For Rancière, this proves that the specific move through which cinema can become one art in the modern sense lies precisely in its being also part of an industry that, as a whole, seems to reinstate the logic of the mimetic regime, with its carefully arranged narratives following generic rules that dramatically constrain both its ‘forms’ and its ‘contents.’ This paradoxical status is proven not only by the film Epstein is discussing but also by the

48

F. PAGELLO

writer’s own effort to undertake ‘a work of de-figuration’ in order to compose ‘one film with the elements of another’ (Rancière 2006: 5). For Rancière, this operation is the essence of cinema and shows that it is an art belonging to the aesthetic regime, as is confirmed by the fact that the same act is at the origin of Deleuze’s books about cinema, Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinema (1988–1998) as well as the work of directors such as Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann, who all worked within the genres of classical Hollywood genres. These filmmakers repeat what for Rancière is the core of Epstein’s theoretical gesture, which he defines as the process of ‘thwarting’ the traditional narrative logic through the power of the mise en scène: A constant principle of what is known as mise en scène in the cinema it to supplement – and thwart – narrative continuity and the rationality of the goals by not aligning two visibilities, or two relationships of the visible to movement, either by means of visual reframings, or by means of the aberrant movements imposed by a character who simultaneously aligns himself with the scenario of the pursuit of goals and perverts it. (Rancière 2006: 15–16)

Consistent with the lesson of the politique des auteurs, Rancière does not simply valorise the act of those authors who abandon the terrain of commercial cinema altogether. Quite to the contrary, his essay stresses that the essence of cinema can be appreciated only by being able to see how the work of mise en scène—that is, cinematic—is able to make room for itself within the context of all types of film, even within the commercial machine of Hollywood films. Epstein’s ‘tragedy in suspension’ is the result of this tension between the careful narrative and stylistic arrangement of words, images and stories, on the one hand, and the effort of the filmmaker to dissolve the conventional effects of this specific arrangement, on the other. In this type of cinema, images and sounds would thus affirm their pure sensory value not instead of but rather along with their narrative and symbolic values. For Rancière, therefore, cinema occupies a paradoxical position in the aesthetic regime because, in order to be able to dissolve the system of representation, it has to reinstate that system in the first place. From another perspective, however, cinema could be seen as one the best expressions of the new conception of art, insofar as the constant threat to its status as art is nothing but the radical manifestation of

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

49

the abolition of any predetermined separation between art and non-art. In fact, the passage through the constraints imposed by what appears inevitably as an external force—the commercial logic of a film industry based on the exploitation of conventional stories, genres as well as the star system—can be seen as the manifestation of the all the key features of aesthetic art as a whole: Such is the art of the aesthetic age. It is an art that comes afterwards and undoes the links of representative art, either by thwarting the logic of arranged incidents through the becoming passive of writing, or by reconfiguring old poems and painting. This work presupposes all past art to be available and open to being reread, reviewed, repainted or rewritten at will. It presupposes also that anything and everything in the world is available to art. Banal object, a flake peeling from a wall, an illustration from an ad campaign, are all available to art in their double resource: as hieroglyphs ciphering an age of the world, a society, a history, and, inversely, as pure presences, as naked realities brought to light by the new-found splendour of the insignificant. (Rancière 2006: 9)

While these lines are interspersed within Rancière’s discussion of Flaubert’s literary style, my claim is that they can also be applied to Tarantino’s cinema. While a nineteenth-century, French writer such as Flaubert had certainly a radically different idea of the type of ‘insignificant’ details on which he wanted to focus, Tarantino adopts the very same approach to the (postmodern) film genres and popular culture that he puts at the centre of his films, and which were already been largely forgotten only a couple of decades after their appearance. The passage above also provides another, even more radical, refutation of postmodernism’s claims about the novelty of its focus on rewriting, reworking and remaking old forms of art—not to mention claims about art’s complete commodification and aestheticisation. In fact, Rancière duly takes notice of how such an approach had strongly contributed to the critical dismissal of art cinema—and critical art altogether. Contra these claims, the French philosopher insists that such declarations reflect only postmodernism’s refusal to embrace the radical uncertainty about the separation between art and non-art at the core of aesthetics as whole: It is true that today we seem more than willing to rehabilitate a cinema of craftsmen in the face of the impasses of an ‘auteur politics’ whose culmination seems to be the aestheticism of publicity campaigns. Nobody needs to

50

F. PAGELLO

be prompted to reiterate Hegel’s diagnosis that the work of the artist who does only what he wants succeeds in showing no more than the image of the artist in general. All we add today is that this image is bound in the end to be confused with the image of a name brand on a product. If the art of cinema accepts to come after producers and scriptwriters and to illustrate the program they provide – which it invariably thwarts with its own logic – it isn’t just because of the pressure the harsh laws of market exert on it. It is also, and more importantly, because of an indecisiveness at the heart of its artistic nature. (Rancière 2006: 11)

I will approach Tarantino’s cinema from this perspective, emphasising its specific gesture of composing ‘one film with the elements of another’ to compose fragments of purely cinematic enjoyment in a way that both gives shape to a coherent narrative and defigures it through the power of mise en scène. In the rest of the chapter I intend to demonstrate that his work as a filmmaker replicates the very attitude that, for Rancière, is an inherent trait to all practitioners, theorists and lovers of cinema.24 In fact, I think that Tarantino would completely subscribe to the closing paragraph with which Rancière ends his essay, and which to my eyes reveals their shared ambition to proclaim the survival of cinema as an aesthetic art against all postmodernist declarations about its ‘demise’ as a result of the widespread aestheticisation brought about by electronic media and, particularly, television. In this programmatic passage, the French philosopher once more tries to demonstrate that film aesthetics cannot be reduced to mechanical (or digital) fabrication, as its roots lie instead in the filmmaker’s ability to construct what he has labelled a ‘thwarted fable:’ The TV monitor isn’t the instrument of ‘mass consumption’ that spells out the death of the great art. It is, more profoundly and also more ironically, the machine of vision that suppresses the mimetic gap and that thus realizes, in its own way, the new art’s panaesthetic project of immediate sensible presence. This new machine doesn’t annul the power of cinema, but its ‘impotence.’ It annuls the process of thwarting that has always animated its fables, the task of the director is then to invert, once again, the game where television ‘realises’ cinema. A longstanding lamentation in contemporary thought wants us to bear witness to the programmed death of images at the hand of the machine for information and advertisement. I have opted for the opposite perspective and have tried to show that art and

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

51

thought of images have always been nourished by all that thwarts them. (Rancière 2006: 18–19)

4

Tarantino ’s Film Aesthetics: Reservoir Dogs

Tarantino’s debut Reservoir Dog has been considered a good example of what in the mid-1990s came to be labelled as ‘the cinema of cool’ (Dawson 1995). Three elements of its style have been especially highlighted in this context: the blatant aestheticisation of the film’s visual style and iconography; the anti-chronological presentation of the narrative; and, the heavy use of citations from cinema’s and popular culture’s history. In my discussion of the film, I will deal with these issues by adopting the approach discussed in the previous section, in order to stress that what really matters in Tarantino’s film is rather close to Epstein’s idea of a ‘tragedy in suspense’ built on and within a solid narrative, (melo)dramatic film. David Roche’s neo-formalist discussion of the film aims to highlight how Tarantino’s cinema does not entirely abandon classical narrative (Roche 2018: 127–149). For example, despite the much-discussed use of three extended flashbacks as a disruption of classical narrative (often considered a quintessential postmodernist move), Roche shows how Reservoir Dogs still adheres to the four-act structure that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have posited to be at the centre of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The film indeed organises the plot according to the usual sequence of (1) setup, (2) complicating action, (3) development and (4) climax. The viewer is perfectly able to follow the dramatic evolution of the facts happening in the warehouse where all the protagonists gather after the robbery, and this narrative thread is shown in a perfectly linear fashion, while the flashbacks gradually provide the audience with all the information that they need to witness the final showdown with an intense sense of participation. Roche also shows that this is not simply an issue of playing within the rules of genre cinema but also of filling the film with thematic resonances and well-developed characterisation. Reservoir Dogs explicitly establishes the relevance of such issues as professionalism, loyalty, performance, as well as race and masculinity (Hilferty 1992; Burnham 1995; Gallafent 2006; Nama 2015; Roche 2018), and all the characters are easily interpreted as representations of different moral and psychological approaches

52

F. PAGELLO

to these issues. Such analysis thus proves that Reservoir Dogs fully participates in cinema’s reinstalling of the logic of the mimetic regime, from its use of a coherent narrative and recognisable generic conventions to the creation of strong characters and the focus on relevant ethical themes. If Reservoir Dogs does add something to the mix, this must be something else. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the accusation of plagiarism received by Tarantino for the obvious narrative and iconographic similarities between his film and Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987) can be best addressed (Sauvage 2013: 38–42). A comparison of the two films perfectly would show that, from a stylistic point of view, Tarantino’s movie is entirely distinct from City on Fire. The American writer-director thus literally ‘builds one film with the elements another film,’ turning some elements of that film’s plot and imagery into the bricks with which he gives shape to something completely different. This work of defiguration of the narrative material, original or otherwise, is what Rancière identifies with the power of mise en scène to ‘thwart’ its ‘fable.’ In what follows, I will try to demonstrate that in the case of Reservoir Dogs this is done through Tarantino’s work both as a writer25 and a director. My analysis will only take into consideration the very beginning of the film, from its opening sequence to the end of the first scene that follows the credits (00:00–11:25). I will discuss more in detail the mise en scène and the writing of celebrated pre-credit sequence, which many have seen as a sort of manifesto of Tarantino’s poetics because of its flamboyant dialogues about Mr. Brown’s interpretation of Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Mr. Pink’s and Mr. White’s argument about tipping and the other various humorous exchanges between the main characters. I will then briefly discuss the title sequence and the scene that immediately follows in order to argue that, taken together, they reveal the tension between stylishness and drama, between ‘coolness’ and aesthetics at core of Tarantino’s work. The mise en scène of the famous opening sequence of Tarantino’s debut film is focused on the conversation that the whole group of characters at the centre of the narrative have around a table in a diner. On the one hand, the viewer is able to follow comfortably the rapid exchanges between them, easily moving from one character to another and starting to know their personalities. All of the main protagonists are introduced. Some of the main figures—Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) and Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney)—are also shown in ways that clearly illustrates their

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

53

relationships in the film (White and Pink, in particular, are immediately opposed one another, while White and Joe are shown to be good old friends). As Roche’s analysis of the scene perfectly illustrates, the whole narrative and thematic core of the film is thus prefigured here, showing the film’s adoption of a careful, and in this respect, classical style (Roche 2018). On the other hand, however, the camera’s placement and movement suggest something else. In the majority of the shots, the camera is positioned behind the head or below the shoulders of one or more characters, which end up occupying large parts of the screen with their dark silhouettes. The viewer is thus offered only an incomplete image of who is speaking, and to whom. Moreover, for the first twoand-a-half minutes, and again in later shots, the camera is the subject of an uninterrupted sinuous circular movement, which further prevents the audience from obtaining an overall picture of the scene and multiplies the obstacles between the viewer and the object of her look. The combination of the position of the camera and the constant reframing makes sure that we cannot link this gaze to that of any of the characters, nor to that of a neutral, external observer that could give us complete access to the fictional world. The style of the scene is therefore split between its representational function, which is certainly active, and a different function, which clearly obeys to another logic and aims at making the viewer feel both immersed in the world depicted and fully conscious of the presence of the camera between her and this fictional universe. As further evidence example of this tension, I will recall here that Roche has highlighted how the use of the circular camera movement can be seen as conveying a specific thematic meaning (Roche 2018: 176–177, 198–200). Roche identifies this effect as a ‘salient device’ of the mise en scène of Reservoir Dogs , to which Tarantino would return in moments that prove crucial for the narrative. Roche goes on to indicate that the direction of the movement can be interpreted in specific and opposed ways. The clockwise movement (which we find in the opening scene) would be associated with a moment in which a character is engaged in the activity of storytelling, whereas counterclockwise movements would be connected to the opposite theme: the inability of Mr. Orange to support his ‘story’, that is, his role as an undercover agent. That the circular movement produces the symbolic meaning that Roche points out proves how this sequence is not just a gratuitous digression from the conventional structuring of a classical crime film but a stepping stone for the creation of the signification of the film from a narrative (and ethical) perspective.

54

F. PAGELLO

However, this is not the whole function of its exhibited use in the film’s (and Tarantino’s career’s) opening scene. In this case, the movement amounts simultaneously to something more, or something less, than its narrative or dramatic significance. Going back to the comparison used by Dana Polan between Pulp Fiction and Disneyland (see infra, pp. 9– 10), the circling camera could be seen as if it was a ride, in which the cinematic apparatus works as a swing, rocking the viewer all around the scene. The peculiar sensory perception that such a device produces on the viewer does not necessarily need to be seen as a sign to be decoded. It is, rather, a highly stylised choice that both supports and ‘thwarts’ the centrality of the characters’ dialogue in this sequence. In fact, what is really happening here is that the viewer is simultaneously asked to listen carefully to what is being said, starting to know the characters and to abandon herself to the aesthetic enjoyment of the intriguing camera work. A representational logic and an aesthetic logic are therefore placed side by side neither to achieve a complete unity nor to work one against the other, but rather to make the gap between the two clearly visible. Tarantino’s work as a writer of dialogues as well as a director of actors has been the object of constant acclaim by critics (not to mention Tarantino’s own self-praise—see, for example, Peary 2013: 52). As already said, David Roche’s aforementioned analysis points to the use of dialogue and acting in the opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs to characterise the film’s key players and introduce its thematic content. In what follows, however, I want to stress how it is possible to see in this scene a ‘thwarting’ of these essential functions of dialogue in order to simultaneously highlight their aesthetic value. Even ignoring the content of the characters’ statements, what strikes the listener is the rapidity and energy with which they are uttered. Almost as in a screwball comedy,26 words never cease to be pronounced in rapidfire, characters incessantly talk over each other, and different tones and registers confront each other. The acting style of Keitel, Buscemi, Madsen and the other protagonists of the scene, which includes Tarantino himself in the role of Mr. Brown, plays a crucial role in this respect, giving to the sequence an unusual liveliness that was immediately noticed by the audience and critics alike. As in the visual track, these sounds create a multi-layered texture by which the listener would be enrapt even if she were not able to understand what is being said. The meaning of the words might be questionable—and questioned: this is in fact the very topic of Tarantino’s own monologue about Madonna’s Like a Virgin, as

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

55

well as Charlie Sheen’s observations about Vicky Lawrence’s The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia—but the effect on the audience is to fill up the spatial–temporal continuity of this sequence with an emphasis on the presence of the spoken word itself. Once again, if the sequence shows the importance of aural perception beyond the significance of what the characters are saying, this should not be seen (exclusively) as Tarantino’s attempt to display his virtuoso writing and directing style as a reflexive deconstruction of film language or a playful homage to classic Hollywood comedy. The unremitting rhythm of the dialogue creates an audio-visual space in which the viewer is immersed and invited to spend time, in order to meet and come to know a group of characters among which he is placed both visually and aurally. In fact, as is often the case with Tarantino’s films, the very content of Tarantino’s dialogue deserves some additional attention, as it seems to directly confirm and explicitly refer to the aesthetic principles that I am addressing here. The famous opening monologue by Mr. Brown, not coincidentally played by Tarantino himself, can indeed easily be seen as a programmatic manifesto of the writer-director’s aesthetic approach. As is well known, the monologue concerns the identification of the real subject of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Contra Mr. Blonde, Mr. Brown argues that the song is not about a ‘vulnerable girl’ with limited sex experience, who meets a ‘sensitive guy’ and thus retrieves her lost ‘innocence.’ Quite to the contrary, the lyrics should be referred to as a very experienced girl having sex with a man with such a large ‘dick’27 that she feels the same ‘pain’ that she had only proven during her first time. This monologue is obviously extremely playful, ironic and self-reflexive (the ultimate features of postmodern sensibility) and it could certainly be dismissed as a most obvious example of Tarantino’s supposed infantile approach to sexuality, as well as an obvious fetishisation of both female and the black bodies (Willis 1993; Polan 2000: 47–57). I believe, however, that it would be a mistake to stop at this level. My point, of course, is not to take too seriously the results of Mr. Brown’s hermeneutical efforts about the meaning of Madonna’s song, but to see in his ‘method’ a self-conscious parody of Tarantino’s own approach to film and popular culture. In particular, the few lines of Mr. Brown’s monologue seem to refer to three aspects linked to the overarching theme of this chapter. First of all, Tarantino challenges the most common understanding of the song’s lyrics, dismissing the apparent meaning of Madonna’s words.

56

F. PAGELLO

Mr. Brown argues that Blonde’s reading of Like a Virgin fails to understand the specific themes of this song because he conflates it with another work by Madonna: ‘Tell that bullshit to the tourists. (…) [Like a Virgin] is not about a nice girl who meets a sensitive boy. Now granted that’s what True Blue is about, no argument about that.’ This seems to suggest that a superficial, ‘tourist’ perspective leads Mr. Blonde to miss nuances, and that different analytical strategies must be selected to suit different texts, even when those texts were by the same author and thus emerging from the same cultural background. Secondly, the objective of Mr. Brown’s monologue is to stress that even in a song that appears light, romantic and sweet, the actual subject is something darker, sexually charged and, above all, harmful. His adoption of a specific perspective for the lyrics of this particular song reveals that, while all of popular culture products seem to easily reveal their (often stereotypical) ‘meaning,’ some works (of the same type) might actually be different. In his speech, Brown ironically indicates that the actual point of the song is not its obvious ideological meaning (virginity as a symbol of innocence, etc.), but something much more ambiguous. Mr. Brown’s interpretation appears less convincing as an interpretation of the song’s ‘real’ meaning than as an attempt to reveal the actual enjoyment expressed the song. This is perfectly reflected by the character’s (and, thus, Tarantino’s) excitement in the delivery of his speech, for instance by the obsessive repetition of the word ‘dick,’ and a process of ‘interpretation’ that consists precisely in liberating the text as a source of an uncontrollable sensory enjoyment. A third and final point: this dialogue reveals a specific approach to narrative. Both Brown’s and Blonde’s analyses of the song are based on their recreation of the narrator’s backstory, her partner’s attributes and the detail of their encounter. However, Blonde’s conventional reading interprets the title line as the parallel between two psychological experiences (that of the first time and that with the newly found partner), immediately charged with moral evaluations and establishing a precise narrative relationship between them. As a result, Like A Virgin becomes the edifying story of a character who goes through different experiences and finally ‘finds herself’ through the meeting with the ‘right’ man. In Brown’s account, on the contrary, the parallel is instead on the physical aspects of two physical encounters: ‘Like a Virgin was a metaphor for big dicks… The pain is reminding a fuck machine what is was like to be a virgin. Hence, Like a Virgin.’ The point is showing how the girl’s narrative is somehow embodied in the sensory experience(s) she went through. What I am pointing out here is

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

57

that Tarantino/Brown’s monologue can be seen as a humorous version of Epstein’s approach to classical Hollywood melodrama, turning the obvious narrative meaning into the elements of a ‘tragedy in suspense.’ Immediately after this opening scene, the credits sequence starts. In this particular case, it would be impossible to deny that ‘coolness’ does occupy entirely the stage. This is indeed the very first chance for Tarantino to introduce a sequence entirely based on the combination of a hip soundtrack (George Baker’s 1969 Little Green Bag ) with the slick images of his gangsters in suits. The sequence starts with a black frame accompanied by the sexy voice-over of a (male) disc jockey, announcing the title of the song. The voice is perfectly paced with the first notes of the bass, which together with the rest of the rhythmic section generates a tension to be released a few seconds later, when the other instruments and the lead singer enter the mix. A parallel tracking shot in slow motion then shows the whole gang walking down the street, stressing their seductive look as well as their confidence. A series of close-ups, still in slow motion, follows that first image, finally giving a proper introduction to the stars of the film. Their suits and their black sunglasses reinforce the viewer’s feelings about their smart look. The final shot, before the screen turns black again to leave room to the rest of credits, shows the characters walking away from the camera, while the title of the film slowly moves from the bottom to the top of the frame. Throughout the sequence, Tarantino makes use of his characteristic typographic fonts, immediately referring to the stylish 1970s imagery that all of his film(s) will maintain. The characters are certainly treated here as quintessential icons of coolness. But when the film’s narrative finally starts at the end of the credits, something significant happens. Even before the first image appears on screen, the loud voices over of Mr. White and Mr. Orange can be heard. The characters interpreted by Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth are in the car, fleeing the robbery. The viewer is placed in the passenger seat in the front of the car, observing the scene as if she were right in the middle of such a dramatic situation. The car is completely covered in blood, as is Mr. Orange’s nice suit. He screams in panic, overwhelmed by a combination of pain, astonishment and helplessness: ‘Oh Shit. I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die! I am sorry. She killed me man. Who’d have fuckin’ thought that? All this…All this blood is scaring the shit out of me.’ He shouts to get support from his partner, calling him by his first name, which shows their familiarity (as we will learn later, this is the reason why he can’t

58

F. PAGELLO

be taken to the hospital, eventually leading to the death to all the characters: in retrospect these simple dialogues therefore represent a crucial passage in the narrative). Mr. White is eager to support his friend, holding his hand covered in blood and talking to him as if he were a scared child, or, perhaps, a junior comrade-in-arms who had been injured.28 His voice is also evidently shaking, revealing his own strong emotions: ‘Just hold on, buddy boy! … ‘You’re gonna be OK. You are gonna be OK! Say the goddam fuckin’ words. Saaaaaaay it!’ The forty-four-second-long take that opens the sequence furthers strengthens the viewer’s feeling and sensory perception of being trapped with the characters in this dramatic situation, before a series of cuts moves back and forth between the two characters, speeding up the rhythm of their frenetic exchanges before the abrupt ending of the scene. As is apparent from this description, the two sequences described above form a pair, in which an image of flawless stylishness is followed by its perfect opposite, a dramatic scene in which the impeccable suits and the macho look of the character are immediately replaced by the display of their physical fragility and psychological fear.

5

Conclusion

The brief analysis above aimed to show how Tarantino’s cinema not only constructs the film’s style and his characters as the epitome of ‘cool,’ but also immerses the audience in a dramatic narrative in which the confidence of the characters rapidly unravels thanks to a mise en scène that engenders a deep emotional experience in the viewer. A series of questions thus arise: is this a meaningful representation or simply the expression of a virtuoso filmmaker, showing off his stylish approach to film language and hip imagery? Are the mise en scène and the writing able to produce any signification, or are they just a light-hearted play of signifiers and citations? Is this ‘real art’ or ‘simple aestheticisation?’ It is easy to recognise in this hesitation the justification of all postmodernist readings of Tarantino’s cinema—both the negative and the positive ones. The Rancièrian perspective I have tried to develop here indicates that this very indecisiveness between these two views is the whole point, particularly because it makes it impossible to support any quick dismissal of Tarantino’s work on the basis of the much-discussed stylishness and self-reflexivity of his films. This ambiguity is, instead, the sign that these films can be understood through the aesthetics of cinema theorised by Rancière. This is proven by how the experience of the viewer

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

59

of Reservoir Dogs cannot be equated to that of a cynical, or even purely ironic observer who would simply enjoy the film’s playful and metafictional aspects. Beyond its (high) entertainment value, Reservoir Dogs tells a dramatic story which none of the characters survive. Moreover, the apparent ‘coolness’ of the film’s style is matched by a marked interest in capturing the viewer in something that makes her feel and think about that world and the characters that are represented. Sure, the gap between these two aspects is not resolved in favour of any ‘unity’ of representation, which would guarantee the firm belonging of the films to a stable artistic, ethical and/or ideological ground. From a Rancièrian angle, however, this should be seen not as problem but rather as a proof of their properly aesthetic nature, placing the viewer simultaneously within and outside the fictional world, and taking her to that ambiguous realm between art and non-art which is the proper space where any actual aesthetic experience can take shape.

Notes 1. Tarantino has declared more than once that despite his admiration for Hitchcock as a director, the cinema of the British master doesn’t feel particularly close to his sensibility. Given the profound influence that, admittedly, De Palma’s oeuvre has had on Tarantino’s view of cinema, I tend to believe that Hitchcock’s work has indirectly had a significant impact also on Tarantino, given unusually explicit attempt by De Palma to carry on Hitchcock’s research as concern both film form and a certain set of thematic preoccupations in the different context of the New Hollywood and 1980s mainstream cinema. 2. In several interviews, Tarantino has repeated the following, extremely revealing anecdote: “While I say I’ve outgrown [Godard], I haven’t outgrown Pauline Kael’s reviews of Godard. The most influential piece of film criticism which applied to my aesthetic, which applied to me … I’m reading her review of Band of Outsiders [Jean-Luc Godard, 1964], also known as Bande à part, which I named my own company after – she’s reviewing Godard’s movie and she says, ‘It’s as if a couple of movie-crazy young Frenchmen were in a coffee house and they’ve taken a banal American crime novel and they’re making a movie out of it based not on the novel but on the poetry that they read between the lines.’ And when I read that I said, ‘That’s my aesthetic! That’s what I want to do! That’s what I want to achieve!’” (see the interview included in the Reservoir Dogs 10-Year Anniversary DVD).

60

F. PAGELLO

3. Gilles Deleuze’s books on cinema of course predated Rancière’s work in this field, and they made a more sustained effort to fully develop the contribution of film to philosophy as such. However, Rancière’s work seeks to insert cinema more organically in a theoretical and historical discourse on modern aesthetics in a way that is less concerned with stressing its cinema’s uniqueness than its dialectal relationship with this larger context. 4. For a discussion of Rancière in the field of Film Studies (and cultural studies), see Bowman (2013) and Dasgupta (2009). I point out here at the only scholarly article in English of which I am aware that deploys Rancière’s theory to examine a film by Tarantino, which is Haslam’s ‘Inglourious Criticism, Basterd Fantasies: Rancière, Tarantino and the Intellectual Spectacle of Hope’ (2015). 5. See, in particular, Rancière (2004), ‘The Aesthetics Revolution and Its Outcomes’ Rancière (2015), and ‘Aesthetics as Politics’ (Rancière 2014). 6. The focus on the aesthetics’ disruptive role is directly linked with Rancière’s conception of politics as based on dissensus (Rancière 2004, 2015). 7. On this opposition see ‘The Paradoxes of Critical Art’ and ‘The Monument and Its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art’s Capacity of ‘Resistance’ (Rancière 2015). 8. The opening section of Introduction to Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Rancière 2014) engages with Bourdieu’s, Schaeffer’s and Badiou’s extremely different declarations of the necessity of abandoning traditional aesthetics. 9. It is probably not a coincidence that Rancière’s writings about art and aesthetics started to appear in the early Nineties, gradually becoming the focus of his work for some twenty years. Rancière entered this debate when the theoretical discourse about postmodernism was at its peak. The perfect simultaneity between Rancière’s interest in the subject and Tarantino’s debut won’t also be missed by the reader. 10. See the opening pages of ‘The Future of the Image’ (Rancière 2007). 11. See ‘Are Some Things Irrepresentable?’ (Rancière 2007), ‘Aesthetics as Politics’ and ‘Lyotard and the Aesthetics of Sublime: a Counter-reading of Kant’ (Rancière 2014), ‘The Ethical Turn in Aesthetics and Political’ (Rancière 2015). 12. See in particular ‘Aesthetic as Politics’ (Rancière 2014) and ‘The Future of the Image’ (Rancière 2007). 13. By ‘modernism’ I intend to indicate here the mix of the many—extremely varied, and absolutely contradictory—theoretical and artistic tendencies of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century that would become the target of postmodernism. While this use of the term is admittedly vague, it might be a useful shorthand in the context of

2

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

61

Rancière’s discussion of postmodernism, since—as is discussed below— Rancière’s rejects the very idea of an opposition between modernity and postmodernity. In this sense, it is interesting to discuss here Rancière’s intense engagement with the work of Lyotard, starting with the insightful (as well as provocative move) of suggesting links between such a radically postmodern thinker with the very monument of high modernist: Theodor W. Adorno—see both ‘Aesthetics and Politics’ (Rancière 2014) and ‘The Ethical Turn in Aesthetics and Politics’ (Rancière 2015). Rancière’s judgement, however, is well supported by the label of ‘late modernist’ that, already in the 1980s, Charles Jencks attributed to Lyotard (as well as Baudrillard, Jameson and other crucial theorists of postmodernity and postmodernism) in his essay ‘Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions’ (Jencks 1987). Andrea Huyssen’s analysis of the gradual and contradictory emergence of postmodernism out of the culture of the avant-garde is still particularly persuasive in this regard. Huyssen’s study of the debate between Adorno and Benjamin on the aesthetic and political relationship between mass culture and the avant-garde is especially useful to complement, and support, Rancière’s discourse. According to Huyssen, Benjamin’s position would indeed already develop a refusal of some key aspects of modernist utopias well before the emergence of high modernism of the 1940s and 1950s, which would be the main target of postmodernist thinkers. See Huyssen (1986). ‘Lyotard and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: a Counter-reading of Kant’ (Rancière 2014). ‘Divided Beauty (Dresden, 1764)’ (Rancière 2013). ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes’ (Rancière 2015). ‘The Little Gods of the Street (Munich-Berlin, 1828),’ (Rancière 2013). See, for example, ‘Why Did Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed?’ (Rancière (2008). As it is made clear later on with the case of cinema, this opposition does not trace a fixed opposition between the popular, commercial arts and ‘real’ Art. Aesthetic images can be found anywhere—their difference from commercial images can only be decided on case-by-case basis, by paying attention to whether each specific work is able to combine or not its artistic qualities with its ‘opposite.’ One of Rancière’s clearest elaborations of this argument is perhaps found in the essay ‘The Future of the Image’ (Rancière 2007), where he discusses complex and inherently trajectory of the visual arts in the course of the nineteenth century and twentieth century. According to Rancière, it is important to pay attention to the dialectical logic of this phenomenon, which is linked to the active effort of

62

F. PAGELLO

self dis-empowering on the part of modern artists: ‘Painters and novelists had to work to make themselves the instruments of their becoming passive (…). The camera cannot be made passive because it is passive already, because it is of necessity, because it is of necessity at the service of the intelligence that manipulates it (…) The mechanic eye lends itself to everything: to tragedy in suspense, to the work of Soviet Kinoks, and not least to the illustration of old-fashioned stories of interest, heartbreak, and death. Those who can do everything are usually doomed to servitude. (…) At the end of the day, the whole logic of representative art finds itself restored, piece by piece, by this machine. And the artist who rules over the passive machine with a sovereign hand is, more than any other artist, doomed to transform his mastery into servitude, to put his art at the service of companies whose business is to control and cash in on the collective imaginary’ (Rancière 2014: 9–10). 24. Rancière writes: ‘Cinema’s enthusiastic pioneer, its disenchanted historiographer, its sophisticated philosopher, and its amateur theoreticians all share this dramaturgy because it is consubstantial with cinema as an art and an object of thought. The fable tells the truth of cinema is extracted from the stories generated on its screens’ (Rancière 2006: 6). While neither a pioneer nor a disenchanted observer, Tarantino appears to combine the functions of all these figures not only through his filmmaking but also his promotion of film culture through his activity in the field of film criticism, distribution and exhibition (see, among others, Bernard 1995; Clarkson 1995; Sauvage 2013: 18–35). 25. While this chapter does not give enough room to this aspect, Tarantino’s attention to writing is a crucial part of the aesthetics of his films and can be seen as another essential element that undermines the postmodernist readings of his work as fundamentally anti-narrative works based on the purely audiovisual elements. Tarantino has constantly defined himself primarily as a writer: he has repeatedly declared he writes movies as they were novels (both The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood were initially imagined as such) and has affirmed to deem his screenplays as readable as ‘a novel’; in his youth, while still uncertain about his future in the film industry, he had seriously considered to become a novelist; finally, in recent years he has constantly expressed the desire to retire from filmmaking and to become an author of film criticism and plays (see many references to this theme in the interviews collected in Peary 2015). As a matter of fact, this aspect is probably an additional point of contact between Tarantino’s and Rancière’s aesthetic sensibility, since the latter has extensively written about the novel as one of the key manifestations of the new regime of art (see, for instance, Rancière 2007).

2

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

63

26. Tarantino’s has always included His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1939) among his favourite films of all time. In his interviews, he proudly remarked that: ‘In fact, on the first page of Pulp Fiction, I describe two characters talking in “rapid-fire motion, like in His Girl Friday”’ (Peary 2013: 100). 27. For a Lacanian analysis of the relationships between language and enjoyment in Tarantino’s cinema, see Botting and Wilson (2001). 28. Edward Gallafent’s 2006 insightful analysis of the characters in Reservoir Dogs adopts this peculiar lens (Gallafent 2006: 13–19).

References Bernard, Jami. 1995. Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. London: HarperCollins. Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. 2001. The Tarantinian Ethics. London: Sage. Bowman, Paul (ed.). 2013. Rancière and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Burnham, Clint. 1995. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Clarkson, Wensley. 1995. Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip. London: Piatkus. Dasgupta, Sudeep. 2009. Jacques Rancière. In Film, Theory, Philosophy: Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman. London: Acumen. Dawson, Jeff. 1995. Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool. New York: Applause. Gallafent, Edward. 2006. Quentin Tarantino. London: Routledge. Haslam, Jason. 2015. Inglourious Criticism, Basterd Fantasies: Rancière, Tarantino, and the Intellectual Spectacle of Hope. In The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope, ed. Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Hilferty, Robert. 1992. Reservoir Dogs. Cineaste 19 (4): 79–81. Huyssen, Andrea. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jencks, Charles. 1987. Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions. Chicago Review 35 (4): 31–58. Nama, Adilifu. 2015. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin: University of Texas Press. Peary, Gerald. 2013. Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Polan, Dana. 2000. Pulp Fiction. London: BFI. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum.

64

F. PAGELLO

Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Thwarted Fables. Oxford: Berg. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image. London and New York: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2008. Why Had Emma Bovary to Be Killed. Critical Inquiry 34 (2): 233–248. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aïsthesis. London and New York: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2014. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2015. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Verso. Roche, David. 2018. Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Sauvage, Célia. 2013. Critiquer Quentin Tarantino est-il raisonnable? Paris: J. Vrin. Willis, Sharon. 1993. The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room. Camera Obscura 11 (32): 41–74.

CHAPTER 3

Space, Time and Dialectics

This unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives, this return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos. (Jameson 1991: XIII)

Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) are walking into a diner. The camera follows both characters, before Mia exits from the right of the frame. Vincent looks left at a huge slot car track. The camera smoothly pans to his side, showing the massive size of the toy to the audience, before moving back again to the right of Vincent, who appears to be admiring the multiple, blurred shapes that turn the background into a moving pattern replete with colours. The shot, now in focus, reveals that the diner is populated by an accumulation of icons from classical American mass culture: with an ample movement back from the right to the left, the camera shows impersonators of Zorro and Marylin Monroe serving burgers and drinks, while an Elvis is playing on the big stage at the centre of the large room. Forty of the sixty-nine seconds that make up this single long take have now passed, and the camera starts following Vincent’s walk along the four sides of the venue, all around the stage. On his right, a series of the grand 1950 and 1960s cars used as dining booths. At the centre of his path, a number of other ‘celebrities:’ the impersonators of James Dean, Dean Martin, Buddy Holly and other old stars. On his left, a few bars illuminated by neon lights, and an endless gallery of posters of B-movies from the 1950s, filled with colours, © The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7_3

65

66

F. PAGELLO

monsters and beautiful girls. At the end of the long take, the restaurant appears as an overwhelming amassment of bodies, objects, images and sounds: an overstuffed living museum devoted to the bygone days of twentieth-century popular culture. This shot comes from the most cited section of Pulp Fiction (and, most likely, of Tarantino’s cinema as a whole): the long scene set in the Jack Rabbit Slim’s diner (Howley 2004; Booker 2007: 47–49; Buccheri 2009; Morsiani 2008). The scene is often presented as a quintessential example of postmodern culture. The reasons are multiple, but I will point out two main arguments discussed by critics and scholars. First of all, the accumulation of references to classical cinema and popular culture to create an inflated version of the diner in American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) or Happy Days (ABC, 1974–1984)—if not of one of their real-life counterparts, such as the 1950s-theme fast-food chain Johnny Rockets—seems to suggest an explicit self-conscious play with postmodern nostalgia and self-referentiality, stressing the replacement of historical reality with pieces of its media representations so crucial in Baudrillard’s influential postmodern theory. Secondly, the sequence is seen an example of the breaking of classical cinema’s focus on narrative-driven construction. During its fifteen minutes, the writing and the mise en scène are completely focused on describing the characters, their relationship and the setting. While extrapolating the sequence from this part of the film might not be an appropriate move—as I insist here below—it is certain that much of Tarantino’s cinema seems to be made of a sum of such sequences that could be taken out of the whole, partially explaining why these separate components of his films have be seen as textbook illustrations of postmodern cinema. In particular, sequences such as this have been linked by critics to the overall temporal structure of Pulp Fiction, a work that has inevitably been associated with its achronological structure and regarded as the ultimate example of postmodernism’s weakening of linear temporal structures and the foregrounding of a spatial dimension. All of this, of course, seems to find a perfect embodiment in the mise en scène of Jack Rabbit Slim’s space, the major reconstructed set in the film and the single most expensive element in its budget.1 As I previously argued in relation to Reservoir Dogs , separating single sequences from the specific episode and the overall film should be considered, as is always the case, a rather risky analytical move. In fact, the overflow of popular cultural references, the slowing down of the narrative, the focus on the characters’ personalities are not opposed to or

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

67

disconnected from the subsequent narrative in which Vincent and Mia are involved: quite to the contrary, they are very much (and dialectically) linked to what follows. The focus on the dialogues, apparently conveying ‘irrelevant’ details about the characters, contribute to buildup of the (erotic) tension between them, so that the suspense created by this stretching of what in a conventional narrative film would be a much shorter sequence serve two apparently contradictory purposes: on the one hand, it facilitates the audience’s engagement in the dramatic (narrative) content of the following scenes; on the other, it amplifies the rupture in the rhythm and the atmosphere established by the different sections of the film. As will become clear throughout this chapter in the discussion of Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism, the use of the term ‘dialectical’ to discuss the relationship between different sections and stylistic choices in Pulp Fiction is not coincidental. In particular, this chapter will highlight how the treatment of space and time in Tarantino’s cinema is also not as simple (and ‘purely’ postmodern) as some critics seem to argue. By looking at the specific shot described above it is possible for example to show how the mise en scène creates a tension between space and time in a context that would otherwise appear as a purely atemporal and spatially smooth representation. The way in which the camera introduces us into the set is already explicit in this sense. Vincent walks through a space that is certainly reduced to the phantasmagoria of commercial popular culture; however, the glimmering, surface-y nature of these images (of these perfect icons of Americana) is immediately redoubled by long take, deep-focus camera movement that carries the viewer within this space. Vincent’s point of view is neither ‘above’ or ‘below’ his surroundings, safely looking at their surface from a distance: it is thoroughly immersed in it. His gaze is completely entrapped by the space and, yet, it is not entirely passive. The character and the camera direct the viewer’s attention on different elements of the set, and later Vincent will talk at length about what he sees, commenting about the aesthetics and the ‘economics’ of the place. While he clearly takes pleasure in its appearance, he also seems to feel somehow at a distance. His attitude remains the same for the rest of the night, as when he awkwardly accepts to accompany Mia on the stage to dance. The positioning of this latter is also significant, as it structures the diner around a central area, to some extent correcting the viewer’s first impression of the restaurant as a completely amorphous space, as it reveals an obvious hierarchical organisation. Indeed, the closing dance scene echoes the initial long take as

68

F. PAGELLO

it highlights the way in which Vincent moves through the diner. The experience of traversing this highly structured space is a crucial aspect of the mise en scène of the sequence and, in general, of Tarantino’s cinema: the characters, the camera and the viewer are always confronted with images that initially appear reducible to two-dimensional icons devoid of any historicity but then reveal their complex, three-dimensional fabric, proving to be much richer than expected, first of all from a temporal dimension. The movement within space is indeed inevitably accompanied by a temporal, and chronological development. The exploration of the space by Vincent and Mia as well as their interactions produce a rupture in the non-linear time that characterises the structure of the film as a whole. When Vincent enters the room, he knows almost nothing about Mia Wallace, except what he was told by colleagues; by the end of the sequence, the situation is entirely different. Those rumours about Mia— with which the audience has become familiar already during the previous episode of the film, contributing to design an even more complex temporality—become the topic of their conversation. Interestingly enough, Vincent brings up this issue after the famous thirty-second-long series of silent shots in which the two characters stop talking. Despite its emphasis on the ‘spatialization of time’—a crucial feature in the postmodern theory at the centre of this chapter—the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence thus brings the temporal dimension to the foreground much more explicitly than most narrative films. Echoing Deleuze’s conception of the time-image (Deleuze 1989), we could say that time is here not represented ‘indirectly,’ i.e. through movement and/or editing, but rather ‘directly.’ First, through the ‘pure optical sound-images,’ in which it is precisely the diegetic music obviously underlines the passing of time and, then, through the dialogues, which constantly refer to the characters’ past as recalled by themselves or someone else. Nothing in the scene is thus designed to suggest that time has actually stopped, nor that memory has been wiped up: on the contrary, space and time are presented as intertwined in a complex and contradictory superimposition—and conflict—between different aspects that complicate the phantasmagorical ‘hyper-reality’ displayed by the set. The question at the centre of this chapter is thus to what extent Tarantino’s mise en scène aligns with the treatment of space and time by many theorists of postmodernism. It does this by engaging with one of the most ‘classical’ theorisation of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson’s. To

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

69

discuss Tarantino’s work through Jameson’s theory might seem redundant, as it brings us back to the mid-1990s or at best the early 2000s, when the influence of Baudrillard’s writings and the global success of films such as The Matrix in mainstream cinema still could support the hegemonic position of postmodernism’s aesthetic and theoretical discourse (Constable 2014). What I will argue, however, is that film scholars have often underplayed one crucial element of Jameson’s theoretical framework, which can offer a different assessment not only of Tarantino but of postmodern cinema more broadly. This element is the central role that dialectical thinking plays in the whole of Jameson’s work. To make this point clear, in the first part of this chapter (Sects. 1 and 2) I start my argument by examining why Jameson cannot be placed in the same camp of the postmodern authors attacked by Rancière, that is, primarily post-structuralist thinkers such as Baudrillard and Lyotard. While acknowledging how Jameson and Rancière move from a rather different background and aim at rather dissimilar goals, in the first section I will also try to put their discussion of postmodernism in conversation, with the goal of letting the aesthetic and political relevance of Jameson’s dialectical thinking to emerge. To clarify how this approach can help reassess Tarantino’s cinema and postmodernism more in general, I will then discuss the different uses of Jameson’s theoretical perspective in the studies published by film scholars Keith M. Booker and Catherine Constable. In the second part of the chapter (Sects. 3 and 4), I will engage with Jameson’s conception of the peculiar relationship between space and history in the context of postmodernism. As is well known, Jameson’s classical essay (1991) indicated the spatialisation of time and the weakening of historicity as two crucial, interrelated aspects of the culture of postmodernism. In my analysis, however, I will focus on the way in which, through the employment of dialectical thinking, Jameson clearly suggests that postmodern art can address its own contradictions and limitations, thus becoming able to reveal its own historical conditions precisely through an analysis of the theme of the spatialisation of time. To prove this point, I will examine the issue of space and history in Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight , whose differences and similarities will help me claim that both Jameson’s and Tarantino’s approach to postmodernism are not reducible neither to a celebration nor to an apocalyptic approach to contemporary culture.

70

F. PAGELLO

In the third and last part, I will first turn towards Jameson’s discussion of the treatment of time and narrative in postmodernism (Sect. 5). In this case I will start with highlighting that the issue of narrative is central in the work of the American theorist, in particular because of the importance played by the analysis of allegory and genre. I will insist that, for Jameson, postmodern culture is neither able nor actually interested in completely abolishing the dimension of time, since its valorisation of narrative implies by necessity the mobilisation of temporality. To explore this issue, I will then return to Pulp Fiction, analysing a few sequences in which the dialectics between (the spatialisation of) time and narrative is clearly articulated (Sect. 6).

1

A Dialectical Approach to Postmodernism

As is well known, Jameson is one of the main proponents of the concept of postmodernism as the symptom of an actual historical, theoretical and aesthetic break. His theory can therefore be included among the implicit polemical targets of Rancière’s conception of aesthetics, which is based on the denial of such a rupture and which in the previous chapter I indicated as a useful perspective to approach Tarantino’s cinema. By deploying Jameson’s theory, I will now try to show how the apparent contradiction between the obvious belonging of Tarantino’s oeuvre to postmodern culture and some key features of its film aesthetics can be better appreciated as a contradiction that is internal to postmodernism itself. In what follows I will indeed argue that it is possible to see Tarantino’s films both as an example—perhaps the ultimate example—of postmodern cinema and, at the same time, as the embodiment of an aesthetics that challenges some of premises of much postmodern theory. Among these latter, the most important is arguably the refusal of dialectical thinking, whose affirmation, on the contrary, lies at the very core of Jameson’s theoretical work. The essential divergence between Rancière’s and Jameson’s approaches is found in their different relation to Hegelian Marxism, which for Jameson remains the guide to examine the role of culture in modern society. In his view, the value of the notion of postmodernism can (only) make sense if it is linked with the economic and political analysis that various authors have offered of the evolution of capitalism,2 as he made clear in the title of his seminal 1984 essay, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (Jameson 1991). Following Ernest

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

71

Mandel’s homonymous book (1975), late capitalism is a new stage in the history of capitalism, which is defined by the effects of the Third Industrial Revolution, which Jameson also calls the ‘Third Machine Age’ (1991: 36).3 The conception of postmodernism not only as an aesthetic or theoretical phenomenon but also as a concrete historical phase implies a reflection on contemporary art and culture in their current historical context, whose specificities seem to be almost entirely absent from Rancière’s analysis of the statue of aesthetics. For Jameson, in fact, the resistance to postmodern theory can be interpreted in a similar way as other kinds of refusal to utilise a critical (Marxist) approach to analyse the current economic system: Objections to the global concept of Postmodernism in this sense seem to me to recapitulate, in other terms, the classical objections to the concept of capitalism itself – something scarcely surprising from our perspective here, which consistently affirms the identity of Postmodernism with capitalism itself in its latest systematic mutation. (Jameson 1991: 343)

While Rancière does certainly not reject the ‘concept of capitalism,’ he openly refuses that of postmodernism. The reason for this might be found in his different interpretation of the context and, especially, the aftermath of that explosion of utopian thinking that had been the culture and the politics of the Sixties,4 which by all accounts represent the crucial historical moment in which postmodern art and theory started to make themselves manifest in different ways (Jameson 1991: XVI; Huyssen 1986). It is indeed as a contradictory result of the radical cultural and artistic movements of that decade, not to mention the ensuing political backlash begun in the 1970s and the 1980s, that the work of authors such as Debord, Baudrillard or Lyotard contributed to the emergence of what soon would become postmodern theory. Of all these phenomena, Rancière and Jameson offer rather different readings. As discussed in Chapter 2, Rancière sees thinkers such as Debord and Baudrillard as promoting an entirely misleading, defeatist attitude towards the objective difficulties encountered by radical movements after the end of the 1960s. For Jameson, on the contrary, such thinkers accurately diagnosed some cultural and historical process: in his view, to deny their insights would not be of great help with the attempt of overcoming their seemingly ‘pessimistic’ conclusions.5

72

F. PAGELLO

What most postmodern theorists affirm about contemporary (media) culture is precisely what Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic regime aims to denounce as a false notion: the idea that art has been entirely subsumed into the realm of commodification, thus losing its political potential from a critical perspective. Quite to the contrary, this is exactly Debord’s and Baudrillard’s conclusion—or rather point of departure—in their analysis of contemporary artistic production. Since the beginning of the Situationist experience in the early 1960s, Debord has declared unequivocally that art has lost all its radical potential (Debord 1967). Since the early 1970s, Baudrillard has affirmed that with the complete mediatisation of everyday life all social, historical reality has been replaced by an hyperreality literally modelled after, and by, the logic of the simulacrum (Baudrillard 1983, 1994). The radical consequence of these processes would be not only the dematerialisation of the work of art but also, crucially, the erasure of that dialectical tension that, as we have seen, constitutes for Rancière the very essence of art in the aesthetic regime: The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. (Baudrillard 1994: 161)

While building on Debord and Baudrillard, Jameson does not fully embrace this latter’s presentation of postmodernism’s anti-dialectical discourse as its ultimate truth. If he argues that it is necessary to acknowledge that this description perfectly fits the way in which contemporary subjects think about themselves, the American thinker claims that it is possible to resist that very ‘pessimistic’ approach for which Rancière reproaches his French colleagues precisely by continuing to affirm the value of dialectical thinking. Utopia, Ideology and the Negative As anticipated above, the main reason for the difference between Rancière’s and Jameson’s perspectives stems from this latter’s faithfulness to Hegelian Marxism. From this perspective, the importance of acknowledging the rupture brought about by postmodernism lies in its understanding that in the post-war period modernist culture proved more and more unable to address the historical transformation occurred with

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

73

the advent late capitalism. In particular, the type of critique practised by radical artistic and political movements of the first part of the twentieth century did not the impact the ability of multinational capitalism in extending commodification to all aspects of social life and to subsume the entire planet through the phenomenon of globalisation (Jameson 1991). Building on Baudrillard and others, Jameson thus famously affirmed that postmodernism is not able to think historically, somehow preparing the ground for the later and fully ideological declaration by Francis Fukayama that the history had ‘ended’ with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Fukayama 1992). For Jameson, of course, History cannot be stopped by the apparent success of capitalism.6 His recourse to (and reinterpretation of) Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics aims at showing how radical theory can (and must) at the same time take postmodernism’s self-description at its own word and strive to identify, within its ideological discourse, the central contradiction(s) that allow utopian thinking to advance a radical critique of the current social organisation. Since the 1970s, in fact, the goal of Jameson’s critical theory has been to highlight the dialectics of ideology and utopia that necessarily animates any literary and cultural discourse (Jameson 1979). While postmodernism’s claim that the radical hopes of modern art and politics are over is at least partially ideological, Jameson’s approach to the phenomenon does not stop at simply denouncing this phenomenon: equally important is the attempt to identify a new kind of utopian thinking that emerges from the very same cultural context (Jameson 1979, 1991). One of the deepest causes of the divergence between Rancière and Jameson can thus be located in the latter’s conviction that the kind of utopian art required in the contemporary, late capitalist environment must present some differences from that which, as Rancière argued, can be seen as characteristic of the whole of modern art since at least the nineteenth century. As seen in Chapter 2, Rancière shares with Jameson an element that contributes to place both of them in opposition to the vast majority of postmodernist thinkers: the reference to Hegel’s aesthetics. Despite the aforementioned affirmation of the centrality of a dialectical tension in any aesthetic work, however, Rancière is not interested in following the Marxist uses of the dialectics. Jameson, on the contrary, builds on the work of Marxist authors such as Adorno, Lefebvre and Debord to articulate his own version of postmodern theory (Jameson 1990, 1991). From this perspective, the utopian promises of modern art are to be seen as an integral part of the historical development of capitalism—possibly

74

F. PAGELLO

one of the central contradictions of the culture it has produced. As a consequence, to correctly evaluate how these utopian elements undergo a transformation in the post modern era is necessary to understand the exact characteristics of the specific mode of production adopted by capitalism in this specific historical phase. In the stage of multinational capitalism, the more general idea of aesthetic utopia celebrated by Rancière should therefore to be questioned and tested against this background. For Jameson, the proper utopian approach to aesthetics in the context of postmodernity cannot but to paradoxically embrace postmodernism’s blockage of modern(ist) utopian thinking. The famous realism-modernism-postmodernism triad analysed in many of his works7 is indeed also an examination of the transformation of the role of art, in both its utopian and ideological function, in different phases in the history of capitalism.8 The evaluation of the political significance of art— what is really is at stake for both Rancière and Jameson—has therefore to consider how aesthetic utopias are themselves historical phenomena which necessarily take up different forms. While in earlier phases the radical contestation of current society might have taken the form of the direct affirmation of an alternative collective organisation, in relation to postmodernism Jameson believes that its utopian effort might be found in the revelation of the apparent impossibility of thinking any alternative to capitalism. At this point, it is also useful to specify that Jameson’s peculiar conception of utopia cannot be fully explained as a result of his historicisation of this concept or his peculiar critical approach to postmodern culture. Since Jameson fully embraces a dialectical approach, his perspective also emphasises the role of the negative. To better understand this aspect of his discourse, I will first go back to Rancière’s own discussion of the opposition between the ‘traditional’ notion of aesthetics and that of postmodernism, before showing that Jameson’s version of postmodernism can lead to a very different judgement of this cultural phenomenon. As seen in Chapter 2, Rancière attacks postmodern thinkers on the basis of their misunderstanding of the actual political value of aesthetics. This value would not consist in the immediate ‘ realization of art’ but in the affirmation of the tension between politics and aesthetics. In this sense, Rancière is certainly closer to Jameson than to Baudrillard or Lyotard, insofar as his theoretical discourse emphasises the radically utopian nature of art through the affirmation of its difference from contemporary social reality. Still, while Rancière’s perspective

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

75

is not as much ‘a misunderstanding of the uses and function of Utopian thought and even Utopian critique’ as are those of their common postmodern opponents (Jameson 1991: 208), from Jameson’s perspective his approach could be judged as not dialectical enough as it emphasises excessively, and exclusively, the affirmative side of Utopia. For Jameson, in fact, the function of utopia is not much that of affirming the possibility of a different way of life but, first of all, to stress the impossibility of even thinking of it in the current moment. In this sense, the work of utopian thinking lies first of all on the side of negation: To posit such [Utopian] discourse and its interest is not at all to affirm its possibility, or […] its capacity in any fully realized sense to step outside our own system. That would be a still relatively representational view of the matter, leading us to inspect More or Skinner – to make an inventory of their positivities and then to add up and compare their visionary achievements. What they achieved, however, was something rather different from achieved positivity; they demonstrated, for their own time and culture, the impossibility of imagining Utopia. It is thus the limits, the systemic restrictions and repressions, or empty places, in the Utopian blueprint that are the most interesting, for these alone testify to the ways a culture or a system marks the most visionary mind and contains its movement toward transcendence. But such limits, which can also be discussed in terms of ideological restriction, are concrete and articulated in the great Utopian visions: they do not become visible except in the desperate attempt to imagine something else. (Jameson 1991: 208)

It is clearly through this angle that Jameson can regard postmodernism’s ‘pessimistic’ view of contemporary political art simultaneously as the final acquiescence to the complete dominance of capitalism—indicating the end of the historical potential of modern utopian thinking— and the affirmation of the persistence of a radical, anti-capitalist and revolutionary perspective in a moment in which this very perspective is deemed as impossible to hold. Similar to much post-Sixties’ poststructuralist theory, based on a radical critique of political mediation, historical teleology and dialectical thinking, Rancière’s theory rejects this approach as equal to the invitation to postpone the realisation of utopia to an indefinite future. For Jameson, however, this perspective should not be abandoned to the apologists of late capitalism, as the dissatisfaction with this negative side of utopia should be seen as the surest indication of a (entirely postmodernist) renunciation of the power of the dialectic.

76

F. PAGELLO

2

Jameson, Tarantino and Film Studies

In this section, I try to show how Film Studies have not often taken into full account the aspect of Jameson’s approach to postmodernism discussed above. This becomes particularly visible in critical debates about Tarantino, whose work has been regularly used as one of the primary examples of postmodern cinema. In fact, analyses of Tarantino’s work through an accurate engagement with Jameson’s theory are not easy to find, and the specificity of Jameson’s contribution is often lost within a more general discussion of postmodernism as framed by other authors, first of all Baudrillard. As already mentioned, for example, Dana Polan’s important monograph on Pulp Fiction draws implicitly on Baudrillard and therefore seems to correspond in many instances to Jameson’s diagnosis. However, since Baudrillard’s perspective is far removed from Jameson’s defence of Hegelian Marxism, dialectics or utopian thinking, Polan’s conclusions cannot but offer a reading of the relation between the film and postmodernism culture which is rather different from what I propose here. Given the centrality of Jameson’s work in the debate on postmodernism, it is not surprising that two recent monographs aimed at providing a general assessment of cinematic postmodernism devote significant space to his contribution. Keith M. Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood (2007), in fact, presents itself as a student-oriented presentation and enthusiastic application of Jameson’s theory to the study of contemporary American cinema. Catherine Constable’s Postmodernism and Film (2015), on the contrary, thoroughly engages with Jameson’s theory in a highly critical way in order to challenge what the author regards as its excessive and even detrimental influence on the field of Film Studies. The radically different evaluation of the contribution of Jameson’s postmodern theory is particularly intriguing for my discourse, as it offers the ideal opportunity to highlight the dialectical tension inherent to Jameson’s work and to stress that only through an equally dialectical approach it is possible to understand its potential. Moreover, since the work of Tarantino occupies an important role in Booker’s and Constable’s books, I will be able to describe the limitation of their approaches before moving to my own analysis of Tarantino’s films through Jameson’s perspective.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

77

Booker’s Popularised Jameson Booker’s approach to Jameson’s notion of postmodernism and, particularly, his discussion of contemporary cinema and mass culture provides us with an admittedly simplified version of the thought of the American theorist, which is somehow reduced to the denunciation of postmodern culture as the result of the complete subsumption of society by capitalism and to the analysis of the ‘dematerialising’ effect of such process. Contemporary Hollywood cinema is thus presented as an entirely self-referential culture, so that postmodern films must be understood as being about cinema rather than reality. The famous Jamesonian diagnosis according to which postmodernism is unable to represent History and can only recycle its representations found in older stages of popular culture through the use of pastiche and the ‘nostalgia film’ (Jameson 1982, 1991: 16–21) is taken by Booker to its ultimate conclusion. Even works such as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which Jameson himself reads as a complex attempt to offer a critical approach to the very ideological limitations of the nostalgia film (Jameson 1991: 287–296), are seen by Booker as a sheer accumulation of film references from different historical periods, which would make it impossible to interpret the work as the representation of any specific social reality: together with another work by Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001), Blue Velvet is thus regarded as a purely melancholic celebration of the imaginary Hollywood myths and their ultimate neglect of the actual world (Booker 2007: IX–XI, 25, 29).9 For Booker, contemporary American cinema also embodies the epitome of postmodernism’s logic of fragmentation, which Jameson has extensively discussed (1991: 370–372). The non-linear narratives that proliferated since the 1990s—and which Booker calls ‘hyperlink films’— are said to perfectly reflect the inability to experience and represent time in a traditional way (Booker 2007: 12–41). Tarantino’s early works are discussed at length in this context, as ‘Pulp Fiction probably did more than any single film to popularize the hyperlink narrative form in film’ (2007: 13). The impossibility of creating a cohesive narrative is also reflected by the logic of the assemblage of different materials—all of which, of course, come from pre-existing sources from the realm of cinema or from any sector of mass culture. In fact, these films seem to resemble, or at least to imitate more and more that quintessential form of postmodern culture that is the music video, which in the 1980s changed the audiovisual landscape with the advent of MTV and influenced the

78

F. PAGELLO

‘hyperkinetic’ style of films such as Moulin Rouge! (Baz Lurhmann, 2001) or Lola Rennt (Tom Twyker, 1998). In Booker’s work, the ultimate consequences of this phenomenon is expressed in even more drastic tones: postmodern films ‘lack of any real message,’ they ‘don’t really make sense from a logical perspective’ and even when they try to appear more ‘serious,’ as with the aforementioned Blue Velvet , their ‘campy’ and ‘exaggerated’ aesthetics ‘tend to undermine any interpretation of the film as a serious examination of the issues upon which it seems to touch’ (2007: XVII). As is to be expected, Booker discusses films such as Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fictions and Kill Bill as some of the ultimate examples of such version of postmodern culture. Pulp Fiction, in particular, is said to be ‘widely regarded as the epitome of popular postmodern cinema’ (2007: 47), openly presenting itself ‘as a cinematic spectacle, a collection of references to earlier movies, and as such [it] is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon of pastiche in postmodern film’ (89). Tarantino is described as the perfect embodiment of the artist completely uninterested in dealing with ‘reality,’ totally absorbed in the history of cinema and exclusively occupied with re-mixing pre-existing pieces of popular culture (2007: 47– 49, 89–96): ‘Kill Bill is not about reality; it is about movies’ (96). For Booker, this is true for any theme that can be found in the films of the writer-director, including the most controversial one, his representation of violence: The two Kill Bill films are sometimes accused of being about nothing but the glorification of violence, and they are certainly violent, featuring such items as beheadings and amputations that result in geysers of movie blood. But it is most definitely movie blood, released by movie violence. These films are not about violence, but about movies; they are really about their own making—and the making of films in general. As Roger Ebert put it in a review of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, ‘The movie is all storytelling and no story.’ But this kind of reflexive self-consciousness, often associated with the strategies of high modernist art, is here pure pop culture. (Booker 2007: 93)

As a result, the actual goal of Tarantino’s cinema would be the creation of an aesthetics of ‘coolness’ (Booker 2007: 13, 14, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95). For Booker this is not only an aesthetic issue but becomes an entirely ethical and political problem.10 Building on such a reading of Jameson’s theory of postmodernism, Booker thus regards Tarantino’s films as the perfect

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

79

negation of the utopian thinking required for a political critique equal to the exigencies of late capitalism. The problem with Booker’s many simplifications of Jameson’s theory, however, becomes apparent precisely through a closer look at this latter issue. The radical difference between the two, Booker and Jameson, is indeed striking in the following passage, which contradicts almost point by point the long quote reported above (p. 75) in which Jameson explains his particular understanding of utopian thinking: As I describe in my book The Post-Utopian Imagination, the loss of faith in historical metanarratives during the postmodern era has been accompanied by a weakening of the utopian imagination, and in particular by a loss of faith in the possibility that utopian dreams might actually be realized. If history did not make sense, how could it be expected to lead to an ideal conclusion? Thus, the postmodern era’s sense of rapid and even terrifying change has been accompanied by an equally horrifying sense that, within the context of late capitalism, nothing ever really changes after all. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Blue Velvet contain a number of potentially utopian images, but they are all both dreamlike and thoroughly commodified. None seem meant as actual possibilities for the real world. (Booker 2007: XV)

The consequences of such perspective are obvious. The very centrality of dialectics in Jameson’s approach to postmodernism is entirely erased, so that the possibility of seeing in postmodern cinema anything but a complete surrender to late capitalism is excluded once and for all. Constable’s Affirmative Postmodernism Catherine Constable’s Postmodernism and Film adopts a wholly different perspective, not only because it moves from an opposed theoretical angle but also because Jameson’s theory of the postmodern explicitly represents the main polemical target of the book. Constable builds indeed her theoretical framework on the work of authors such as Jean-François Lyotard (1984) and Linda Hutcheon (1988, 1989, 2002), whose poststructuralist framework is at odds with Jameson’s background in Hegelian Marxism. Particularly interesting for my own discourse, moreover, is that Constable utilises a well-known article about Pulp Fiction by Peter and Will Brooker (1996) as a starting point to present what she defines as ‘affirmative postmodernism’ (2015: 75), which she also explores in her

80

F. PAGELLO

extensive, and convincing reading of Kill Bill (2015: 102–119). The film is seen from a completely different perspective than in Booker: its visual and narrative style is said to rework well-known archetypes of popular cinema in new and significant ways and thus to offer a formal equivalent to its thematic ‘content,’ which is also carefully analysed in detail in order to explicitly prove that Tarantino’s work—and postmodern cinema as a whole—cannot be fully understood through a perspective such as Jameson’s one. Postmodernism and Film revolves around the opposition between ‘nihilistic’ and ‘affirmative’ postmodernisms, which is supported through a reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, here regarded as ‘a paradigm of postmodern theorising’ (2015: 46). Constable engages with, and rejects as ‘nihilistic,’ the writings of Baudrillard (2015: 47–56) and Jameson (2015: 56–67), as well as the deployment of this latter in Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood (2007: 67–74). This aspect of Constable’s work is also of particular interest for my own argument, as it provides the opportunity to address how Jameson’s ideas have been received by scholars in Film Studies, both positively and negatively, in a way that radically differs from how I will utilise them in my own analysis of Tarantino’s cinema. The crux of Constable’s criticism of Jameson can be located in what she sees as the reduction of postmodernism’s interest in surface to ‘superficiality’ (2015: 62, 65) and in the devaluation of the role of reflexivity and parody through of his concepts of the pastiche and the nostalgia film (2015: 83–86). According to Constable, this would lead Jameson to denounce all examples of postmodern culture as ‘a voiding of signification’ (66), that is, as fundamentally meaningless and, therefore, deprived of any critical value. Constable explicitly rejects a crucial aspect of Booker’s account of Jameson’s treatment of postmodern cinema which, in her view, ‘takes the form of holding postmodern films to modernist standards and criticising them for failing to conform’ (2015: 74). Such an approach would be linked to a sort of nostalgia for high modernism, as proven by Booker’s unfavourable comparison of the way in which Joyce’s Ulysses and the Coen brother’s O Brother, Where Art Though (2000) refer to their common source: the Odissey. For Constable, Jameson’s judgement seems to limit itself to a reproach of postmodern filmmakers for their inability to display ‘the proper use of quotation, namely its deployment in the formulation of dialogue and/or critique’ (2015: 70). In this sense, she regards Jameson’s rendition of postmodernism as the consequence of

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

81

the ‘nihilism’ of his theoretical approach, which can be firmly described as ‘an overarching narrative of decline’ (2015: 70). Such a narrative is then challenged by building on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and its rejection of the ‘logic of negation,’ seen as the result of a ‘perverse resentment toward life, nature and materiality’ (2015: 79). To rebuff such a nihilistic attitude, Constable argues that Zarathustra’s distinction between degenerate and affirmative perspectives can also be applied to theory. Those trapped within the degenerate logic of negation are simply the antithesis of the systems and values that they reject; while theories that affirm life create and express new fictional concepts that are linked to diverse systems of value. Both of these categories are useful for thinking through different modalities of postmodern theorising. (Constable 2015: 46)

By looking at Jameson’s work from this perspective, it is clearly impossible to use it to identify any ‘redeeming’ quality in postmodernism. This is why, in order to analyse postmodern cinema, Constable proposed to adopt a radically alternative framework, which she identifies in the appreciation of postmodernism’s creative as well as critical potential in Linda Hutcheon’s theoretical work and in Peter and Will Brooker’s aforementioned article on Pulp Fiction. Despite their obvious opposition, however, it seems to me that Booker’s and Constable’s uses of Jameson actually share at least one common aspect. Their views, in fact, focus on a specific set of formal features (pastiche, fragmentation, superficiality and so on) identified by the American thinker as the markers of postmodern aesthetics, but do not engage with the two underlying elements of Jameson’s theory—his emphasis on dialectical thinking and a specific approach to utopian thinking—that I have highlighted above. As a result, I claim, they both miss the opportunity to mobilise Jameson’s work in a more nuanced manner, as I will try to do in the next sections of this chapter.

3

Space and History in Jameson’s Theory The Spatialisation of Time

In order to challenge reductive readings of Jameson’s theory as a narrative of decline—in which utopia is completely abolished and the emphasis of postmodernism’s emphasis on formal issues such as ‘surface’ are only seen

82

F. PAGELLO

from a negative perspective—I will examine Jameson’s reflection on the postmodern ‘spatialisation of time.’ In the chapter of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism specifically devoted to the theme of space, Jameson explicitly denounces as ‘nostalgic and regressive’ any approach dominated by ‘a sense of loss’ for modernism’s ‘deep time’ and ‘deep memory’ (1991: 156). As he sets out to compare and contrast the modernist emphasis on temporality and the postmodern valorisation of spatiality, Jameson clearly states that ‘such a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos, minimally teaching us, by way of Necessity, that the way back to the modern is sealed for good’ (1991: 157). The opposition between the modernist valorisation of depth and the postmodernist emphasis surface is thus immediately presented not as an issue of positive or negative evaluation. Instead, the comparison stems from the effort to identify two divergent ways in which space and time have been articulated in two different historical and cultural moments: A certain spatial turn has often seemed to offer one of the more productive ways of distinguishing postmodernism from modernism proper, whose experience of temporality – existential time, along with deep memory – is henceforth conventional to see as a dominant of the high modern. (Jameson 1991: 154)

Equally important, this distinction is understood not as a simple replacement of one category (time) with another (space). Jameson is keen to specify that he refers to ‘two forms of interrelationships’ between ‘two inseparable categories:’ challenging Deleuze’s perspective, which he unequivocally regards as ‘postmodern’ and ‘Nietzschean,’ he remarks that even ‘to imagine something like a pure experience of a spatial present beyond past history and future destiny or project’ is simply an ‘impossible effort’ (ibid.). Therefore, the concept of the spatialisation of time in postmodernity should not be conceived as the affirmation of the actual erasure of time by the hand of space but as the ‘will to use and to subject time to the service of space’ (ibid.). To better engage with Jameson’s discourse about the function of surface or the notion of nostalgia film, it is thus necessary to look at them from the perspective of the dominance of space over time. For Jameson, both topics are related to the distinct ways in which the modern and the postmodern relate to both time and space. In modernism, the

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

83

subject’s relation to the world is primarily derived from the centrality of temporal phenomena of subjective ‘experience’ and ‘expression’ (ibid.). Postmodernism, however, dramatically questions these concepts, casting doubt on the possibility for subjects to refer directly to their own experience or to express their individual interior states. The dimension of space becomes primary because, in the context of postmodernity, the only way to relate to our existential, i.e. temporal, experience appears to be through the ‘writing of time, its enregisterment’ (ibid.). In particular, it is only through that specific spatialisation of (subjective) time represented by the text —and especially those (audio)visual texts so central in the postmodern era—that contemporary culture seems able to access temporality and historicity (ibid.). Jameson’s theory is thus far from positing a complete annihilation of time and from embracing of Baudrillard’s nihilistic denial of any possibility for contemporary culture to relate to its historical context. With the very same move with which he claims that the postmoderns are only able to relate to history through its textual/spatial representation in older cultural texts, the American theorist presents postmodernism as the vehicle for our (dialectical) relationship to our own historical period. As already seen, for Jameson postmodernism results from a transformation of the status of culture in late capitalism, that is, of what has been variously called “consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or ‘high tech,’ and the like” (1991: 3). In this sense, the spatialisation of time results from the process by which art and representation are shaped by modern media and technology: We may speak of spatialization here as the process whereby the traditional fine arts are mediatized: that is, they now come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question. (Jameson 1991: 162)

If the concept of spatialisation is directly related to the process of mediatisation, then the affirmation that contemporary culture relates to time in a spatial way should not be confused with the idea that time has become completely inaccessible to cultural works, irremediably condemning all of them to a ‘superficiality’ narrowly understood as ‘emptiness’ and/or ‘meaninglessness.’ Jameson’s diagnosis, on the contrary, means that the only way to access time is now to pass through

84

F. PAGELLO

such process of spatialisation. A dialectical approach to this culture of surface can (and, indeed, must) still make historicity emergence precisely by ‘reflecting’ that peculiar historical situation in which that dimension of reality appears unreachable. This is one of the ways to read the programmatic statement, already mentioned in the Introduction (p. 15), with which Jameson opens his preface to Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. (Jameson 1991: IX)

It is now clear why a more complex presentation of Jameson’s thought can take us in a very different—to some extent, even opposite—direction than both Booker’s and Constable’s. As this passage from the opening pages of Postmodernism shows, Jameson’s understanding of the weakening of historicity in postmodernism is more dialectical than they have presented it: It is hard to discuss “postmodernism theory’ in any general way without having recourse to the matter of historical deafness, an exasperating condition (provided you are aware of it) that determines a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate attempts at recuperation. Postmodern theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an “age”, or Zeitgeist or “system” or “current situation” any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne’s thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall. (Jameson 1991: X–XI)

Jameson’s reference to the shopping mall here is particularly appropriate, since this particular kind of public space embodies the complete modernisation and commodification of society, leading postmodern theory to declare that the spatial dimension has become predominant and threatens our relationship to history. But the discussion excerpted above is clearly intended to affirm something more contradictory: the mall is at the same time the negation of historicity and an obvious product of historical change, suggesting that even if much of postmodern cultural production

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

85

is uninterested in rising to the challenge, postmodern theory reveals that one of that culture’s driving forces is, in fact, a striving to reconnect once again with a proper understanding of its own historicity. Spatial Historiographies In the preface cited above, Jameson points out that some of his studies on postmodernism published after his 1984 article—‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’—focused on a set of themes that were not discussed in that groundbreaking work. Among these, two are of particular relevance for my argument: the role of utopia and the ‘return of the repressed of historicity’ (1991: XV). While I discussed the former in the previous section, I will now focus on the latter, drawing on one of the sections of the long and complex ‘Conclusions’ to the Postmodernism book. The specific section is called ‘Spatial Historiographies’ and addresses the perplexities of those who, from many different angles, had questioned his claims about the predominance of space and the ‘weakening of historicity.’ First of all, Jameson acknowledges the work of Henry Lefebvre (1974) as the source of his conception of the centrality of space in the present historical phase (1991: 364–365). Lefebvre’s (Marxist) analysis focused on how space is ‘produced’ and experienced differently in different historical periods as a result of their specific mode of production, and concluded that in the post-war era a spatial logic had been the ‘cultural dominant’ (ibid.) Building on this framework, Jameson returns to his own discourse on the relation between cultural forms and the different stages of capitalism. The opposition between modernism and postmodernism is here presented as the result of the movement from a transitional moment in the process of modernisation to its final completion (1991: 365–367). Jameson suggests that the primacy of the temporal dimension in modernism can be interpreted as the effect of the coexistence of two different temporalities: that of the traditional, i.e. rural and preindustrial, world, and that of the new, i.e. urban and industrial, society. In his view, the opportunity to live simultaneously in both of these different, somewhat irreconcilable, times is what made modernist artists so sensitive to the representation and reflection of the experience of temporality. The postmodern period, on the contrary, is conceived as that moment in history in which the old temporality of the pre-modern has entirely disappeared, since the world is now completely absorbed by industrial

86

F. PAGELLO

society. Time seems to have lost its centrality as our fundamental dimension. Limitless urbanisation, the deep industrialisation of the countryside and, finally, the increasingly rapid pace of globalisation place the individual at the centre of an overwhelming bombardment of spatial stimuli, so that even the temporal (and historical) dimension appears radically subordinated to the spatial. As a result, and as he writes in the very final section of the Postmodernism—significantly entitled ‘How to Map a Totality’—Jameson sees therefore the postmodern experience of space as defined by saturation: The new space that thereby emerges involves the suppression of distance (in the sense of Benjamin’s aura) and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places, to the point where the postmodern body – whether wandering through a postmodern hotel, locked into rock sound by means of headphones, or undergoing the multiple shocks and bombardments of the Vietnam War as Michael Herr conveys it to us – is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed. There are, of course, many other features of this space one would ideally want to comment on – most notably, Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space as what is simultaneously homogeneous and fragmented – but the disorientation of the saturated space will be the most useful guiding thread in the present context. (Jameson 1991: 412–413)

As is always the case with Jameson, however, postmodernism is not reducible to a sociological description of the subject’s experience. It is first of all the conceptualisation of how culture reacts to the social reality and gives shape to its tensions. This function of culture is clarified in ‘Spatial Historiographies’ when Jameson suggests that it is possible to get ‘some more articulated sense of postmodern space by way of postmodern fantastic historiography, as that is found alike in wild imaginary genealogies and novels that shuffle historical figures and names like so many cards from a finite deck’ (1991: 367). To analyse this ‘fantastic historiography’ he proposes to distinguish two types of narratives. The first type is described as a chronicle (generational or genealogical) whose grotesque succession and unrealistic personnel, ironic and melodramatic destinies, and heartrending (and virtually cinematographic) missed opportunities mime real ones, or to be more precise about it, resemble the dynastic annals of small-power

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

87

kingdoms and realms very far from our own parochial ‘tradition’ (the secret history of the Mongols, for example, or well-nigh extinct Balkan languages which were once the dominant power in their little universe). Here, a semblance of historical verisimilitude is vibrated into multiple alternate patterns, as though the form or genre of historiography was retained (at least in its archaic versions) but now for some reason, far from projecting the constraints of the formulaic, seems to offer postmodern writers the most remarkable and untrammelled movement of invention. (Jameson 1991: 368)

What is relevant (and would appear rather surprising for the readers of both Booker and Constable) is how Jameson comments on such historical narratives that would appear as the perfect target for a Baudrillardian diagnosis about the disappearance of history and the triumph of hyperreality. On the contrary, Jameson argues that the aim of these works is not ‘the derealization of the past, the lightening of the burden of historical fact and necessity, its transformation into a costumed charade and misty revels without consequence and without irrevocability’ but rather to establish ‘an active relationship to praxis’ because ‘the making up of unreal history is a substitute for the making of the real kind’ (1991: 369). Instead of decrying their creation of alternative worlds, therefore, Jameson valorises their ‘attempt to recover that power and praxis by way of the past and what must be called fancy rather than imagination.’ While it is true that such fabulation must be understood the ‘symptom of real impotence,’ he also claims that ‘its very invention and inventiveness endorses a creative freedom with respect to events it cannot control, by the sheer act of multiplying them.’ In conclusion he clearly states that ‘narrative invention here thus by way of its very implausibility becomes the figure of a larger possibility of praxis, its compensation but also its affirmation in the form of projection and mimetic reenactment’ (Jameson 1991: 369). The second typology of spatial historiographies is for Jameson even more important, as it is said to have ‘unique things to tell us both about postmodern spatiality and about what happened to the postmodern sense of history in the first place’ (ibid.). Jameson looks at this the kind of ‘fantastic historiography’ as the inverse of the first type, insofar as here ‘the purely fiction intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear’ (ibid.). What interests

88

F. PAGELLO

Jameson is that in his view such narratives present the spatialisation of time ‘in second-degree form, as the consequence of some prior specialisation – a kind of intensified classification or compartmentalization’ (1991: 370). More concretely, he describes this manipulation of history and superimposition of real and imaginary history as ‘a comic book juxtaposition, somewhat like a schoolboy exercise in which all kinds of disparate materials are put together in new ways’ (Jameson 1991: 370). For the American theorist, the reason for the success of such works in relating to the specific historicity of their actual historical moment is exactly the combination of apparently dissonant and incompatible figures, episodes and registers. By placing together elements taken from different moments of time, as well as ‘unrelated compartments of the social and material universe’ (1991: 373), these texts make visible the ‘compartmentalisation’ of social life, which is for Jameson the quintessential trait of the postmodern world. These narratives highlight the breaking down of the relationships among the elements of society as a spatial phenomenon: all these different elements are juxtaposed with each other, as if placed on a canvas in front of the subject, who is unable to detect the temporal and historical dimension of the events (373–376). Such a way of a representing the postmodern experience is not discarded by Jameson as a failure, but as a form of narrative that captures their current historical situation: As an ideology which is also a reality, the ‘postmodern’ cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices whose recombination in their totality could alone disprove it. (Jameson 1991: 376)

As a result, narratives that show the dominance of the spatialising logic of ‘compartmentalisation’ are neither denounced as complicit in the derealisation of the world, nor praised for allegedly participating in such a movement: quite to the contrary, they are valorised as ‘historiographies’ capable of representing the present situation in such a way that allows the adoption of a critical perspective. Given the two kinds of narratives described and praised so approvingly by Jameson, it is thus rather difficult to see how his theory can have inspired the damning and moralising attitude of Booker’s analysis of Hollywood cinema. Likewise, it is hard to recognise in the nihilistic, nostalgic modernist described by Constable the author of these lines.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

89

On the other hand, taking into account Jameson’s writing on the return of historicity in postmodern narrative can help think critically about the more recent films by Tarantino, from Inglorious Basterds (2009) to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), with their conscious manipulation of history that intersperses actual and fictional figures in narratives presenting themselves as completely ‘spatialised’ in the sense described above, as well as reflections on the contemporary meaning of history and, indeed, historicity. In the next sections, I will thus analyse the dominance of space and its relation to the representation of history in Tarantino’s cinema by discussing two films—including his debut—in which these formal and thematic concerns are clearly at the centre of both the narrative and the mise en scène.

4

Space and History in Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight Reservoir Dogs

The most obvious characteristic of Tarantino’s use of space in his first two feature films is the conspicuous prevalence of indoor locations. Such confined spaces, however, are immediately connected to the external spaces as well as to each other, in part because of the film’s references to the crime genre. In fact, the different locations appear as part of a continuous space, that of the quintessential postmodern (and noir) city, Los Angeles, which in these films offers only loose and temporary boundaries between its interior and exterior areas. Diners and cars, for example, are among the most frequent types of spaces used in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and Tarantino’s mise en scène stresses their hybrid status by placing visual emphasis on windows and the light coming in from the outside. As we have seen, the sequence at the Jack Rabbit Slim’s even puts the cars inside of a diner, making the differences between outdoor and indoor spaces all the more blurred. The suppression of the barrier between private and public spaces is one of the most-discussed features of postmodern cinema and, in fact, of film noir as the matrix for this new aesthetics (Copjec 1994). In this sense, it is not surprising to recognise in Tarantino’s cinema the typical postmodern tendency to abandon the phantasmagorical and/or utopian images associated with the representation of the modern city. Not only do his films refer to an unmistakable Los Angeles imagery that is the epitome

90

F. PAGELLO

of the post-urban environment (Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001), but they also give up the opportunity to represent this city’s paradigmatic urban sprawl to explore instead the interiors of buildings such as apartments, restaurants and abandoned warehouses. This aesthetic decision is heightened in Tarantino’s debut film, in which only four sequences (including the opening credits) take place outdoors. The most important of the indoor locations is of course the warehouse in which most of the film takes place. While the warehouse is an enclosed location, it is a very spacious and empty one, whose size and layout suggests its previous function was likely of the most public kind, such as a factory or storage space for a large business.11 A paradigmatic example of postmodernism’s urban imagery, this post-industrial setting typically evokes the amorphous saturation that, according to Jameson and others, replaces the modern(ist) rational organisation of the city around industrial labour and its precise temporality. The postmodern city, in fact, appears as a chaotic accumulation of materials and structures that does not amount to a coherent ‘totality,’ clearly showing how the modern(ist) rationalisation of space-time through architecture and urban planning has somehow gone astray. Reservoir Dogs ’ warehouse certainly displays some of these characteristics. The mise en scène emphasises its main setting as one of those open spaces that are privileged locations for both postmodern office buildings and galleries. Everything is visible to the gaze: nothing, or no one, is hiding behind the surface. The complete visibility, paradoxically, becomes the very reason for the characters’ paranoia.12 As Jameson argues in relation to the relevance of conspiracy theories and narratives in the postmodern era (Jameson 1991: 37; 1992: 9–82), the very impression that everything has become visible through technology is the source of the feeling that there must be something kept secret from the viewer. In the case of Reservoir Dogs , both the characters and the audience know that this is indeed the case, as from the beginning of the film Mr. Pink convincingly proves to Mr. White that the only explanation for the failure of the robbery is the presence of an informer. To promote this sense of paranoia, therefore, Tarantino insists not on the presence of something concealed but, rather, on the impossibility of deciding on the status of what is visible. Everything in this open space is immediately in sight of the characters and the viewers. There are no trap doors or hidden annexes, no corners around which imposters or hidden clues could be prowling. And yet, the

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

91

viewers, much like the panicked robbers, sense that they are seeing and understanding only a sliver of the story that is unfolding in plain sight. In Jameson’s view, in a world where compartmentalisation makes the thinking of totality impossible the recurring theme of conspiracy is a symptom of the necessity of dialectical thinking (Jameson 1991). In the case of Reservoir Dogs , this contradictory process becomes apparent in the choice to place the narrative in a single, encompassing space. The muchdiscussed temporal fragmentation of the film is in reality less striking and relevant than Tarantino’s interest in bringing all the characters and all the storylines to a single conclusion, in a specific unity of time and space. The reunion of all the characters in the last, crucial scene—mirroring the opening sequence analysed in the previous chapter—cannot but be seen as the confirmation that their being scattered in space and time during the rest of the film is dialectically linked to the strength of their connections. The famous Mexican standoff—the first of many similar sequences in Tarantino’s cinema (and, obviously, another link to the oeuvre of Sergio Leone)—spatially represents the interconnectedness of the characters, while also showing that their relations is first and foremost that of a mortal conflict. If this discussion suggests a correspondence of the film to Jameson’s conceptualisation of postmodernism, the images and sounds of Reservoir Dogs appear very far from those of the quintessential form of postmodern audiovisual form: the music video, known for its fast-paced editing style, rapid and/or continuous camera movements, the use of close-ups and out-of-focus techniques, and the incorporation of different kinds of (more or less low-quality) electronic images.13 Tarantino’s cinematic spaces are produced through a completely different, if not opposite, use of the camera and of film itself. As perhaps became clearer in retrospect (not least because of Tarantino’s increasingly outspoken refusal to use digital technology for shooting or projection), the images of Reservoir Dogs hearken back to an older cinematic style. While camera movements and the handheld camera are strategically used (see infra, pp. 53–54; Roche 176–177, 198–199), the camera most often stands still, usually at a significant distance from the characters. The takes are conspicuously longer than is common for most contemporary cinema, let alone television. The consistent use of deep focus, matched with long shots of large spaces, is indeed one of the most striking features of Reservoir Dog, marking Tarantino’s landmark debut as that of a devotee to a film

92

F. PAGELLO

aesthetic that aligns much more with modern filmmaking than with the kaleidoscopic imagery of postmodern cinema and video. The stylistic choices just described would be less significant if they were not associated with another element, which concerns the scenography of these shots. The warehouse and the few—crucial—outdoor locations are striking for being fairly empty spaces. Therefore, Reservoir Dogs does not construct images of spatial saturation, the spectacular accumulation of materials and structures that has become the (stereo)typical representation of the postmodern city, as depicted in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Quite to the contrary, the film revolves around a warehouse that is almost completely devoid of furniture or storage materials, as well as a series of views of Los Angeles streets, alleys and parking lots that appear rather empty of cars and passers-by. As can be deduced from the most classical analyses of the emergence of modern cinema (Bazin 2005), the use of long shots and few, calculated camera movements, combined with the preference for the long take and the deep focus, inform an aesthetic and phenomenological experience that is very different from that sought after by much postmodern art. If in postmodern films such as Reservoir Dogs any access to historical time seems foreclosed, space itself can still appear as deep, and it might be perused both by the camera and by the gaze of the viewer, who is encouraged, in purely Bazinian fashion, to explore the periphery of the frame, as well as to wonder about what can be hiding behind the corner. The audience is thus certainly exposed to a quintessentially postmodern world in which it seems difficult if not impossible to orient oneself from a spatial as much as temporal point of view, while the euphoric and selfdestructive behaviours of the characters manifest in their appearances, behaviours and voices; and yet, the mise en scène clearly operates on a different register. The image, first and foremost in its spatial dimension, is not entirely reduced to a shallow surface. Quite the reverse is true, since the locations of Reservoir Dogs often seem to have been stripped bare precisely to reduce the level of hyper-signification that is typical of postmodern urban spaces.14 As mentioned above, Tarantino’s use of film as such is also relevant as it points to the writer–director’s disinterest in embracing new forms of technological aesthetics (such as video, special effects and so on) that are so much at the core of postmodernism and postmodern cinema in particular. More broadly, Reservoir Dogs introduces Tarantino’s recognisable taste for urban and interior decors that are as removed as

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

93

possible from the science-fictiony, electronic imagery of much of contemporary audiovisual media. It is understandable, and partially reasonable, that this tendency was to be seen as entirely compatible with postmodern nostalgia and the emerging taste for ‘vintage’ popular culture (some of which, of course, Tarantino strongly promoted through his interest in older popular culture artefacts). In fact, there is absolutely no doubt that this is an essential part of his work. Nevertheless, another important quality of his aesthetics is a genuine and consistent refusal to embrace the dematerialisation that comes with the new media. As concerns the representation of space, in fact, Tarantino’s films do not allude to a ‘disappearance’ of the referent or, worse, of reality itself. The spaces and places in his films—first and foremost cinematically, and then in terms of the diegesis—are extremely concrete, and phenomenologically rich representations of a world in which both the characters and the viewers are asked to immerse themselves. Tarantino’s resistance to the lure of what Jameson calls the postmodern ‘technological sublime’ is crucial for my argument, as the fascination for the new machines is one and the same with what Jameson describes—this time in perfectly Baudrillardian language—as the derealisation of the world in postmodern culture (Jameson 1991: 32–37). In what follows, I will therefore argue that this aspect of Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism does not apply to Tarantino’s cinema. On the one hand, films such as Reservoir Dogs are incompatible with such a perspective simply because the materiality of the film as film is never negated but constantly affirmed. Tarantino’s cinema doesn’t create a circumscribed imaginary world: it presents itself as an actual machinery— that of Hollywood and any other film industry around the globe—with its producers, writers, directors, stars, as well as critics and fans that through cinema participate in this world and in the everyday life of its viewers. The phantasmagorical nature of his—and anybody else’s films—should not be mistaken for the possible source of confusion between reality and fantasy, or the dissolution of this former into the latter: reality and fantasy are simply two, deeply interrelated dimensions of the very same world. Here, as in Rancière, the dialectical relationship between the image as a thing in itself and the image as representation comes again to the foreground. Reservoir Dogs ’ images of spaces, characters and events are never presented as pure ‘simulacra,’ hyperreal signs alluding to a reality that has never been there: they immediately present themselves as actual objects

94

F. PAGELLO

placed in front of the camera by someone (Tarantino and his crew), somewhere (Los Angeles), in a specific moment in time (the early 1990s). On the other hand, in Tarantino’s films the characters are never confronted with objects, spaces or images deprived of ‘real’ consequences on their environment. The exact opposite is true, as the narrative and the mise en scène in Reservoir Dogs illustrate. I will cite here three crucial examples, discussing one of them a bit more extensively. The first example is, of course, the devastating impact of Mr. Blonde’s murdering and torturing behaviour. The character’s uncontrollable sadistic instinct is presented as a destructive force that cannot be contained by the other characters, reshaping the appearance of the places in which they find themselves and, finally, leading everybody to their mutual self-destruction. The iconic scene of the cutting of the ear is the best example of Blonde’s literally marking the body of his fellow characters. The second, equally obvious example is the key role occupied by Mr. Orange’s bleeding body. Its centrality in the film’s mise en scène, from the opening scene in the car to the final one in which Mr. White hugs him on the floor of the warehouse, indicates how space is here not a flat, unreal surface but rather a deep, articulated dimension in which there is often something that hurts the characters as well as viewer. The third and last example is the representation of space in a specific scene, which, in fact, represents the central narrative moment connecting the two previous elements. The scene in question is strategically placed at the end of the last, and longest flashback, focused on the backstory of Mr. Orange. It shows the final minutes of Orange and White’s dramatic escape from the location of the robbery and how Orange gets shot. The scene is bookended by two (typically Tarantinoesque) outbursts of violence. At the beginning, Mr. White brutally kills two policemen while one of the robbers, Mr. Brown (played by Tarantino himself) dies; in the final part, when Orange and White steal a car to continue their escape, the former is unexpectedly shot by the driver, whom he immediately shoots dead. While these two sections are characterised by fast-paced editing, the central part of the sequence is a forty-four-second-long single take, which follows the characters as they walk away from their initial car and look for another vehicle. This shot is taken using an extremely smooth steady camera movement and represents a surprising, suspended moment before and after two sudden and brutal explosions of violence. Most importantly, the sequence displays a very specific taste in the mise en scène of the urban space, while at the same time conveying a crucial aspect of the narrative. The shot focuses on those

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

95

empty Los Angeles streets mentioned above, beautifully plunging the characters into a vast space whose depth is not only stressed by the camera work (including some lens flares, a device rarely used by Tarantino) but also strongly amplified by the careful orchestration of the sounds of sirens coming from far away, at first very clearly and then gradually fading out. The smooth movement accompanies the characters as they walk away from empty lots surrounded by chain-linked fences and enter a residential neighbourhood. The perturbed energy of the characters seems escalated by images of sealed-off spaces: closed garage doors, barred windows, squat houses with harsh right angles. A set of train tracks, which Mr. White seems to ponder crossing before turning to walk down the street, evokes another boundary. Noticeably, no vehicles or people are visible until one car (the one they fatally stop) rumbles into the frame. Possibly one of the subtlest moments in the film, this sequence highlights Tarantino’s peculiar portrayal of the empty streets of a postmodern Los Angeles in which the experience of such apparently historical spaces is inevitably marked by the constant flowing of time. The Hateful Eight The discussion of Reservoir Dogs above has consciously avoided developing a Jamesonian reading of the film as an allegorical representation of a certain historical-political context, focusing instead on the representation of space.15 This is because my objective was, first of all, to test Tarantino’s aesthetics against Jameson’s theory about the spatialisation of time. In what follows, however, I will touch upon Reservoir Dogs from a different perspective by discussing The Hateful Eight , for the very reason that this latter openly rewrites the former, presenting itself as the author’s reflection on the implicit historical and political meaning of his debut film. As a result of the new direction taken by Tarantino’s cinema since Inglourious Basterds , each of his recent films has been set in a specific historical period, and their thematic core has turned to political matters, with particular attention to the representation of conflicts concerning racism and white supremacy. As critics and scholars have argued (von Dassanowsky 2012; Speck 2013; Roche 2018), this new phase can clearly be examined as a self-reflexive transformation of Tarantino’s image from that of a cynical, frivolous and/or sensationalist director into a more mature, pensive and ‘serious’ auteur.16 What has not yet been sufficiently elaborated, however, is the dialectical relation between this last phase and

96

F. PAGELLO

the previous one. In Chapter 5, in particular, I will discuss the relationships among several films by Tarantino across these two phases of his career; arguably, the most noticeable example of these links is found in the couple formed by Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight , in part because Tarantino has explicitly stated their direct connections. While it may seem too obvious, one striking difference between the two films is that the endless, highly theatrical dialogues that characterise both of them differ completely in tone and content. On the one hand, we have a set of playful and ironic discussions of pop culture, starting with the analysis of songs by Madonna and Vicky Lawrence in the opening scene and continuing with the discussion of Pam Grier’s films and TV series in the following sequence. On the other hand, we have long and detailed discussions of the characters’ involvement in the Civil War, their alliances and allegiance with each side of the conflict, their views of the Law and its practice in the Far West and so on. This immediately points out that what in Reservoir Dogs remained implicit becomes the very object of endless discussion in The Hateful Eight . While the former could be accused of meaningless self-referentiality and unconscious racism and sexism through the obsessive references to pop culture made by a group of white men, the latter thus explicitly thematises historical and political events that are openly marked by issues of racism and sexism. In this section, I will compare the two films in terms of their aesthetics and political discourse by analysing their respective representations of space. Like Reservoir Dogs , The Hateful Eight is set for the most part in one single, indoor location; more precisely, it transpires in a sort of Western ‘open space’ that reproduces the first film’s claustrophobic experience. If the two spaces are structurally and functionally similar, however, their differences are hard to miss. ‘Minnie’s haberdashery’ appears as the opposite of the empty, well-lit spaces of Reservoir Dogs : it is dark, divided and densely populated. The first glimpse of the inn reveals an overstuffed and dim interior. Its corners and surfaces are occupied, either by characters or a by variety of objects—most of which will not be part of the action and thus inhabit the visual space as sheer presences. What they indicate is first and foremost that there is something that is not seen, something lurking behind, under and around these objects and in the sections of the haberdashery that elude the camera and the characters’ gaze. The very structure of the building is broken down in different sections: by several poles, which are strategically placed within the frame to make the shots entirely different from those in Reservoir Dogs ; by the action and words

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

97

of the characters, who place themselves into specific parts of this space, explicitly evoking the re-enactment of the Civil War through a splitting of the cabin in a ‘Northern’ and a ‘Southern’ side; by the existence of a basement, which remains unknown to the viewer and the characters until the last part of film (in which it is shown for a few brief moments) but plays a crucial role in the plot; finally, by the numerous exits and entries of the characters to reach other ‘satellite’ buildings, which are linked to the main room and yet create a much more fragmented space than the one at the centre of Reservoir Dogs . The lighting of The Hateful Eight is completely different from that of Tarantino’s debut. In Minnie’s haberdashery, in particular, the director emphasises the stark contrast between areas of the set that are illuminated and those that remain dark. The inn has no visible or open windows; the narrative takes place during a snowstorm; most of the action unfolds at night, so even when the door (which has to be nailed down to remain closed) opens, large portions of the frame, if not the majority, stay black. As a matter of fact, The Hateful Eight is certainly the darkest of Tarantino’s film as concerns its palette of colours—whereas Reservoir Dogs is the one (excluding his last, Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood) that offers the most luminous and washed-out palette in the director’s filmography, as is stressed by the scenes shot in the streets of Los Angeles. By contrast, even the opening scenes shot in Wyoming’s snowy mountains are marked by a play between bright and dark sections of the frame: the presence of the clouds alluding to the impending storm, the silhouettes of the woods on the background or the multiplication of the black shapes of the trees, which cut across the frame in a way that replicates the vertical lines made by the inn’s poles in the second part of the film. The Hateful Eight represents space in a manner far removed from the ‘ahistorical,’ unmarked and unified form that Jameson describes as a characteristic of postmodernism, as well as from the spaces described in Reservoir Dogs . Here, space is fragmented, chaotic and the source of paranoia as much as in the earlier film, but its structure signals how racial and political conflicts are visible everywhere17 in spite of the fact that the Civil War is putatively finished. Retroactively, it is easier to see in Reservoir Dogs an allegory for the postmodern, neoliberal view of society in the early 1990s: a supposedly ‘pacified’ world that was hiding its racism, sexism and violence in plain sight. By contrast, The Hateful Eight offers itself to the viewer as an immediate exposé of the conflicts that in the 2010s have resurfaced to shake American society18 and, yet, are rarely analysed

98

F. PAGELLO

seriously in American popular culture, and even more rarely traced back to their far (but far from solved) historical origins. It is useful to go back to Jameson’s discourse on the obsession of postmodern culture with history. In his account, postmodern (popular) culture is not uninterested in the existence and relevance of history. On the contrary, the issue is that, for all its continuous effort to represent the past and its importance for the present, postmodern culture is unable to think about the actual historicity of the past or the present. In this sense, Reservoir Dogs could be seen as embodying Jameson’s opening slogan to Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism already mentioned above: ‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’ (Jameson 1991: 3). The film does not simply re-present the inability of the postmoderns to relate to the past in general; rather, it depicts their tendency to do so through the reified images generated by mass culture, which appears lost in a seemingly ‘ahistorical’ present. This element is certainly present in Reservoir Dogs , first of all because of the superimposition of materials taken from different moments of the twentieth century (and, especially from the 1970s). However, the film also offers a reflection on the historical dimension of this condition: its crime narrative and the figures of the criminals and cops are a transparent allegory of financial capitalism, as Jameson among many others have argued about crime cinema in general and Reservoir Dogs in particular.19 We can now go back to the particular spaces represented in Reservoir Dogs and compare them to those staged in The Hateful Eight . I had started with the simple observation that Tarantino’s mise en scène in his debut film focuses on a threshold between indoor and outdoor spaces, which aligns with postmodern theory’s diagnosis of the eclipse of a proper private sphere in contemporary (media) society. I had also noted how the predominance of the ‘open space’ of the warehouse matched Jameson’s (and Copjec’s) analysis of postmodern space as the locus of a complete visibility that, through a dialectical movement, generates a sense of paranoia, the feeling that something must be hiding in plain sight. All of these elements come back in The Hateful Eight , except that something extremely important is changed. Whereas the indoor space in Reservoir Dogs seems to transform the city into a closed stage, locked up unto itself (an allegory of the—ideological—closedness of postmodern culture), the closed spaces of The Hateful Eight are constantly shaped by the futile

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

99

attempt to lock the Other out, resulting in a transparently self-destructive structure. The film’s opening sections—‘Chapter One: Last Stage to Red Rock’ and ‘Chapter Two: Son of a Gun’—make this thematisation of expulsion apparent. The first thirty-seven minutes alternate between the space outside of the coach and its interior, constantly stressing their interconnection through shots of the snowy landscape as seen from the coach, as well as shots of the coach as seen from outside, framed by the wilderness. The coach is the place where all the characters aim to enter, and the community in which they want to be included: the outside, while beautiful and majestic, is turning into a deadly threat due to the impending storm. Most of the dialogues, in fact, revolve around the right to and the regulation of the characters’ access to the coach. Even the long digressions about their identities and their pasts directly relate to their opportunity to get inside and their ability not to be expelled from this space. The important scene in which John Ruth (Kurt Russell), Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) all fall out of the coach is entirely linked to this issue, and this is also the moment when the last of the main characters, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), is added to the cast. As much as the content of the dialogue, this treatment of space expresses Tarantino’s rewriting of Reservoir Dogs ’ political allegory: the problem at stake is the way in which space is made accessible, in this case highlighting the racial and political conflicts that structure this space as divided. It is no coincidence that the ‘Lincoln letter’ is mentioned here for the first time and plays a crucial role in setting up the narrative: Major Warren is granted access to the coach precisely as a result of his having forged the letter and his ability to present it as authentic. ‘Chapter Three’ is the longest part of the second act of the film. During its sixty minutes we get introduced to a new set of characters and to a place, ‘Minnie’s Haberdashery,’ which gives the title to this section of the film. As noticed above, this space echoes the warehouse of the Reservoir Dogs but also modifies it in significant ways. The haberdashery, as its name makes us aware, is a stuffed, fragmented space that represents a broken-down version of a proper open space. The narrative and the mise en scène both stress this aspect, showing John Ruth and Major Warren exploring the different corners and outbuildings, trying to acquire an overview of the place but acknowledging its complexity. It is the function of ‘Chapter Four: Domergue’s Got a Secret’—the latter, shorter part of the second act—to show how this intricacy will be fatal to John Ruth,

100

F. PAGELLO

O.B. (James Park) and, gradually, all the other characters, as it allows danger to hide not in plain sight but around the corners and in the secret spaces of Minnie’s Haberdashery. This section starts with the intervention of Tarantino’s own voice, which takes up the role of the narrator to point out that the spatial structure of the inn, matched with the effect of Major Warren’s storytelling, contributes to the obliviousness of most of the characters to one of the most important actions in the film, Joe Gage’s (Michael Madsen’s) poisoning of the coffee. The section then ends with an equally ‘spatial’ twist: the shooting of the main character, Major Warren, by Jody Domergue coincides with the revelation that Ruth and Warren’s exploration of their surroundings had failed to reveal the presence of a space that will prove fatal to them. Here the reversal of Reservoir Dogs is complete, as the characters’ paranoia is insufficient to even suspect the direction from which danger might come, because the space around the characters has not been properly mapped. Moreover, as shown in the following section of the film, the temporal dimension intervenes to further prove that a purely spatial apprehension of the situation is inadequate. ‘Chapter Five: The Four Passengers’ consists of a flashback detailing how the members of the Domergue gang have prepared their ambush for Ruth and his prisoner. The contrast to Reservoir Dogs is once again revealing. While the latter famously adopts an unusual temporal structure which leaves out the central event around which the plot revolves, The Hateful Eight seems to offer an entirely linear presentation of events; at this point, however, the film jumps back in time and fills an essential gap. More importantly, the flashback that sets up the third act of the film corresponds to a complete spatial restructuring of the set. In the last two chapters, the haberdashery becomes for the first time the type of open space that Reservoir Dogs was entirely about. All the characters are indeed now visible to each other, and the film turns into the same jeu au massacre. In ‘The Last Chapter: Black Man, White Hell’ we return to the present, when the film nearly transitions into a horror movie (the common model for both The Hateful Eight and Reservoir Dogs being in fact John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing ) in which the characters proceed to kill each other, concluding with Daisy’s hanging. As the title of the chapter suggests, we have here the explosion of the dialectical contradictions that oppose the characters along with their spatial and political positions.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

101

The North/South conflict, paralleled and complicated by that between Frontier Justice and the Law, is ‘resolved’ through the definitive alliance between the black and the white character, brought together by the exercise of an act of violence and revenge. This execution, however, also realises the so far purely ideological synthesis to which the Lincoln letter alluded. The hanging of the ‘Southern Lady’ (Roche 2018: 27) is the full revelation of the dialectical relationships between all these binary oppositions: white supremacist and black revolutionary, Southern soldier and Northern soldier, the law and the exercise of vigilante justice. Of course, the way in which this act suspends the racial and political antagonism vexing American society does not eliminate, but rather emphasises, the violence and the hypocrisy that structures that society at its core. The Hateful Eight brings to the foreground, through its spatial organisation, not only its own historical context but also that of Reservoir Dogs . The latter’s presentation of 1990s American society as an ahistorical, entirely spatial phenomenon is revealed as the result of an ideological operation, of which both films are designed to indicate the limit. The earlier film, however, does this by showing a space that collapses from within, and without knowing how to address the negativity that opens up within itself from a proper historical perspective. The Hateful Eight , through the conspicuous parallels with its predecessor, fully unearths the political unconscious of postmodernism, making explicit the problem of inclusion, tracing back the roots of such underlying conflict to the Civil War and linking this latter to the racial and gender struggles of our time. While still postmodern in its inability to illustrate a less-than-catastrophic outcome for such contradictions, the film certainly indicates a significant change in the apprehension of its own historical context, which we might to identify as the symptom of a later phase in postmodernity.

5

Time and Narrative in Jameson’s Theory Making Time (and Narrative) Appear

If historicity is apprehended spatially in postmodern culture and in Tarantino’s cinema, what happens to time itself? Is it entirely subsumed in this process? Is the cinematic experience simply reduced to its spatial (visual) elements? And what is the fate of the process of experiencing films as narratives, that is, as a series of meaningful events that unfold over time?

102

F. PAGELLO

If one emphasises the Baudrillardian aspect of Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism, the conclusion would be that almost nothing is left of the proper temporal and narrative dimension of cinema. Film images, reduced to spatial simulacra generating a hyperreality, would not be suited to create characters and describe events open to interpretation. As mentioned throughout the previous pages of this book, this is the approach that many scholars have taken to Tarantino’s films and, especially, Pulp Fiction (Polan 2000; Booker 2007; Buccheri 2009; Morsiani 2008, 2016). Polan’s monograph on this film is particularly of relevance, not only because it is often cited approvingly by the scholars referenced above, but also because it brings together a variety of issues directly connected with Jameson’s or, more precisely, with Baudrillard’s framework. For Polan, the very desire to find meaning in films such as Pulp Fiction and to interpret their audiovisual style, narrative and themes is indeed a misunderstanding of their nature and function (Polan 2000: 79–82). In fact, this desire could be even seen as an attempt to revive modernist categories such as auteur cinema, formalism and ‘excess:’ such an effort would clearly prove to be misplaced as it misses the central role of reflexivity and irony in postmodern culture.20 While this sounds all too familiar at this stage, here I want to insist more specifically on the particular relationship between time and narrative. Following the approach to postmodernism mentioned above, both of these elements are more or less annihilated. Building on Jameson’s framework, however, I argue that it is possible to reject such a reading not only because it offers a conception of the relationship between space and time that is eminently anti-dialectical, but also because it relies on a non-dialectical idea of time itself. Narrative and Allegory, Ideology and Utopia One way in which Jameson’s theory helps bypassing postmodernism’s apparent disdain for the temporal and narrative dimension of contemporary cinema is through the centrality of the practice of allegory and, more importantly, of allegorical reading. In the years leading to his first and most successful interventions in the debates on postmodernism, Jameson had indeed been developing his almost equally influential allegorical approach to the analysis of literary narrative and mass culture in essays such as ‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film’ (1977), ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ (1979) and, of course, The Political Unconscious (1981).

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

103

As Clint Burnham (2016) has recently shown, these texts can still be extremely productive to explain not only ‘high’ postmodern films of the 1970s—as well as the 1980s films Jameson discussed in his later essays on postmodern cinema (Jameson 1982, 1990, 1992)—but also contemporary works such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). In fact, even Jameson’s most recent volume, Allegory and Ideology (2019), does not shy from further developing his model and offering it for the analysis of contemporary culture. Referring the reader to Clint Burnham’s two monographs on Jameson for a discussion of the full implications of this allegorical approach in relation to cinema (Burnham 1995, 2016), I will point out here only what in his complex discourse is linked to the theme of this section— time—and how the connection is operated by deploying another, crucial concept in narrative theory: the notion of genre. In the essays mentioned above, Jameson deals indeed at length with the issue of genre in mass culture and, more specifically, in Hollywood cinema: Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Star Wars (George Lucas (1972), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) are among the titles examined more in detail, always having in mind the belonging (and reworking of) a certain genre’s narrative and industrial tradition. This attention should be distinguished from that of postmodernism for popular narratives, the hybridisation of genres and so on: what Jameson points at is, first of all, the representational and industrial value of genres, before their aesthetic and (sub- or counter-) cultural significance. And, in this sense, what is at stake is their structural function as narratives, that is, as texts that construct and convey a certain representation of the world through the act of storytelling. This is certainly not a surprise, since Jameson famously rejected Lyotard’s diagnosis about the ‘end of master-narratives’ by declaring this idea as the ultimate master-narrative (see also the quote that opens this chapter). In fact, as Lyotard himself had perfectly explained, postmodernism has nothing to do with the end of narratives, but, on the contrary, with a proliferation of the narrative logic in all aspects of human culture (Lyotard 1979: 18–37). For Jameson, however, this is nothing new and cannot be used either as an argument to support postmodern theory or to reject it. As he already explained through the subtitle to The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Jameson 1981), Jameson believes that narrative represents an essential aspect of

104

F. PAGELLO

the human experience as well as the basic foundations of all social and political structures. As he stated even less ambiguously a few years ago: ‘I am at least postmodern enough to be willing to defend the proposition that everything is narrative’ (Jameson 2009: 484). Once again, this is immediately linked to the goal of Jameson’s discourse, which here manifests through the analysis of the coexistence of ideology and utopia in all narratives. This is, in fact, the motivation behind his criticism of both modernist and postmodernist attempts to eliminate, limit or circumvent the political relevance of narrative: any attempts to conceive of an aesthetic that would entirely avoid the dimension of narrative coincides with the equally impossible effort to think outside an ideological framework. Of course, from this perspective, declaring the end of ideology is the most ideological affirmation of all: trying to think beyond narrative is just an attempt to deny the complex play between ideology and utopia, affirming the latter without—dialectically—acknowledging its indestructible tie to the former. This becomes obvious when Jameson analyses American films, both Hollywood and independent productions. In these cases, his analysis focuses on elements of the plot and generic features and on the examination of the film’s place in the media system, taking into consideration industrial issues and the role of stardom. The goal is to highlight how some specific stories, their narrative material, manufacturing and circulation through media channels can be symptomatically assessed allegories of the social and political contradictions in the dominant culture. In his work about postmodernism such analysis is developed at its fullest in the interpretation of films such as Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982),21 Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986)22 or Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986).23 In his readings, Jameson proves that to affirm that a certain film showcases some key traits of postmodern culture does not imply that it will be devoid of narrative or meaning. His examples focus on films that creatively re-elaborate the genres of mass culture by activating the interplay between their ideological and utopian tendencies in ways that explicitly allude to the impossibility of historical change and, therefore, to temporal and utopian dimensions. As already argued in his 1979 essay ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’—which opens up his reflection on the limits of modernism’s own presentation as an alternative to mass culture and, thus, on the emergence of postmodernism—Jameson highlights the utopian aspect that, in his view, has to be present in any work of mass culture, that is, in any ideological production.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

105

A Dialectical Approach to the Representation of Time The full background and consequences of this approach are arguably best illustrated in the final section of a much more recent work, The Valences of the Dialectic (2009), in which Jameson set out to explore the centrality of the idea of the dialectic in his conception of temporality—as well as the centrality of time in his concept of the dialectic. The issue of how (postmodern) culture and narrative can represent history can indeed be thought in relation to a conception of history as the occurrence of phenomena in which different temporalities are both connected and separate. This is how Jameson describes the proper goal of the historian: to give a perceivable form to what seems not to be available for direct representation. Commenting on Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1957), Jameson focuses on Braudel’s conception of the coexistence of different dimensions of time (the long durée, the medium durée and the courte dureé) and of the historiographic work as the affair of linking these different threads together without eliminating the tension between them. To reconstruct the ‘totality’ of a certain historical period means therefore to carry on a dialectical operation, rigorously following the warning that such process of totalisation is never complete and that the work of the dialectic is not to offer a static synthesis but rather to put in motion the ‘totality’ (the apparently entirely positive ‘structure’) that has been cut out from the temporal flux of history (Jameson 2009: 534–545). This operation is also a narrative one. Time, therefore, can be made to appear through the power of storytelling, and this aspect has to be included in any proper dialectics, as leaving out this dimension would actually entail letting spatialisation become complete. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (1984– 1988), Jameson explores one fundamental ideas about the nature and the relation between time and narrative. Time (and, therefore, history) can only be grasped as an abstract idea through the representation of the gap and the intersection between different temporalities: I have already noted one of Ricoeur’s philosophically most audacious statements—the affirmation that “there can be no pure phenomenology of time.” This means in fact that there can be no purely philosophical definition of time; we now need to rephrase this in terms of a more familiar contemporary and post-contemporary theme, namely that of representation. Aristotle says that time is not movement, but somehow always

106

F. PAGELLO

appears alongside movement; what can this mean except that time, in itself unrepresentable, can only be represented through the representation of something else—the movement of wind in the trees for example? (…) this is the immense advantage of Ricoeur’s inclusion of his narrative examples— Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, Proust (…). What these examples show is that it is only in the intersection of multiple kinds of temporality that Time itself—if one can speak of such a thing—can be made to appear. (Jameson 2009: 500)

It is through narrative that the contradictions between different temporalities can emerge. As a consequence, all narratives (including historiography) cannot successfully aim at bridging different temporalities into an organic whole: on the contrary, they consist in opening up a continuous series of aporias, which are the results and the symptom of that intersection of different temporalities.24 In my discussion of Pulp Fiction I will employ this perspective to argue that analyses of Tarantino’s cinema, and postmodern film more broadly, miss this dialectical aspect when concentrating exclusively on the Baudrillardian ‘Disneyfication’ of reality that Polan, building on Anderson (1995), wants to see in its aesthetics (Polan 2000: 71). Contrary to this point of view, I argue that stories and, therefore, time, matter. I will first look again at a sequence of Pulp Fiction (about Vincent shooting heroin) in which the temporal flux is obviously blocked through specific audiovisual style and an explicit relaxation of the narrative. As in my previous discussion of various scenes set at the Jack Rabbit Slim’s diner, I will then reinstate this sequence within its context, and I will juxtapose it to another moment in the film in which the very act of storytelling is shown as the combination of different timelines and the exposition of its own duration. In fact, in Pulp Fiction the problem of representing history is linked to the work of the storyteller, and the essentially temporal nature of her work. I suggest that this idea is made clear in a specific sequence of Pulp Fiction, the flashback/dream devoted to Butch’s childhood memory. Through the (ironic) story of the Butch’s gold watch, even this (allegedly) completely ahistorical film explicitly foregrounds its own historicity, showing its awareness of being the product of a period—at the climax of high postmodernity—in which the tension between different temporalities seemed minimal and yet the act of storytelling was still able to express it through narrative that is, through a necessarily temporal operation.

3

6

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

107

Time and Narrative in Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction, it has often been argued, is a movie about time (Howley 2004). The obvious question is thus: what kind of time is (re)presented by the film? Is it the Baudrillardian time of postmodern cinema, in which true historicity is replaced by the nostalgia for an earlier form of mass culture (Booker 2007)? Or is it the equally postmodern but opposed Deleuzian time of pure Becoming (McGowan 2011)? Are the film’s narrative structure and mise en scène the embodiment of non-classical, non-linear storytelling (Thompson 1999)? Or, quite to the contrary, is Pulp Fiction the ultimate proof that contemporary Hollywood storytelling is able to re-absorb such ruptures into (neo-) classical narrative cinema (Howley 2004)? The fact that these questions point in opposed directions and have been answered in incompatible ways certainly demonstrates that Pulp Fiction—the most successful and influential of Tarantino’s films, the one that became in the span of a few months the epitome of postmodern cinema, if not postmodernism as a whole—has elicited multiple, contradictory analytical perspectives. Before offering my view on this issue, I will thus look at a few studies of Pulp Fiction’s treatment of time, which, once again, highlight the coexistence of one two incompatible points of view: Pulp Fiction as the ultimate case of the, allegedly, ‘post-narrative’ spatialisation of time in typical of postmodernism, or as the evidence for the survival of (post-?) classical narrative cinema in contemporary, metafictional cinema. Reading Time in Pulp Fiction To many scholars, Tarantino’s second feature film is characterised first and foremost by its breaking of classical linear narratives. While offering radically different interpretations (and evaluation) of this feature, most of the analyses of the film have focused on this aspect, which has been understood as a reflection on the experience of temporality in contemporary, postmodern society. As mentioned above, this is a crucial aspect of M. Keith Booker’s discussion of Pulp Fiction. Here the film is seen as the quintessential example of the trend towards achronological narratives in postmodern cinema and, particularly, in 1990s American film. Booker looks at its structure as an example of what he calls ‘hyperlink cinema,’ which would

108

F. PAGELLO

comprise other works such as Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), Run Lola Run (Tom Twyker, 1998), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000), Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) or Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001). His judgement, as usual, is harsh as it is trenchant: Hyperlink crime films, perhaps because of the influence of Pulp Fiction, tend to be presented in a self-consciously hip mode. As a result, many of the films influenced by Tarantino (including Ritchie’s) have been regarded as shallow and superficial, far more interested in style than in substance. (Booker 2007: 15)

On the very opposite side of the critical spectrum—that supporting the ‘affirmative postmodernism’ discussed by Catherine Constable—Peter and Will Brooker’s aforementioned article insisted that Pulp Fiction’s achronological narrative should not be reduced to a gratuitous showoff of reflexivity and coolness (1996). For them, the non-linear structure redoubles and emphasises the deep thematic core of film: the theme of ‘redemption.’25 The use of non-linear narratives is indeed connected to the characters and the main stories they narrate: on the one hand, Jules’s and Butch’s arcs lead to their emancipation from Marcellus; on the other, Mia’s and Vincent’s ‘resurrections’26 have been seen as an allusion to the ability of fiction to subvert linear time. Building on post-structuralist theories valorising reflexivity and parody as an expression of difference, Peter and Will Brooker thus saw in Pulp Fiction’ temporal structure a key element of its affirmative approach towards fiction in general, and popular culture more in particular. An interesting analysis of Pulp Fiction as a quintessentially postmodern reflection about time is a chapter in Todd McGowan’s book Out of Time: The Ethics of Atemporal Cinema (2011). While McGowan’s goal is to unfavourably compare the film to other later works such as The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) or The Constant Gardener (Fernando Mereilles, 2005),27 his theoretical discourse is extremely useful in this context. In fact, the reasons why McGowan disapproves of Pulp Fiction would be regarded as highly appreciative comments from almost any critic, particularly the postmodernist ones. For him, ‘the film so clearly wants the spectator to enjoy the cinematic and cultural clichés in which it traffics, (that) it ultimately encourages the spectator to abandon the past and embrace the novelty of the future.’ Paradoxically, he affirms that

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

109

‘The clichéd formal style that Tarantino develops in Pulp Fiction becomes itself the source of difference. (…) Clichés do not remain mere clichés in a Tarantino film, which is why they function as a source of pleasure’ (McGowan 2011: 49). What is crucial for my own argument is that by emphasising Tarantino’s interest in turning the cliché intro something new and different McGowan aims at qualifying it as the direct expression of a conception of time as a force of pure Becoming, which he links to the names of Spinoza, Deleuze and even Antonio Negri28 : ‘Tarantino’s effort in the film is to show the powerlessness of cliché in the face of the productive movement of time as unleashed by the cinema’ (ibid.). As a result, McGowan considers the film to be dominated by ‘absolute contingency’ (2011: 45), as both its narrative structure and cinematic form aims to elicit a sense of unpredictability and shock from the audience: Though bell hooks is correct to note that “Tarantino’s films (…) titillate with subversive possibility (…) but then everything kinda comes right back to normal,” this is true only on the level of content. The form of Pulp Fiction undermines the normality of the content by revealing the lack of any order within this normality. At any time, the film might break off in a new direction through the introduction of a contingent event. The film’s embrace of contingency is a symptom of its investment in temporality itself. (McGowan 2011: 45)

McGowan’s reading thus confirms that all of these commentaries, while very different from each other, regard Pulp Fiction as an anti-dialectical work. For post-structuralist scholars such as Peter and Will Brooker or Catherine Constable, this is of course a merit: the film’s play with film history and narrative structure display the creative power of postmodernism, refuting its allegedly ‘Jamesonian’ reduction to an expression of late capitalism’s nihilism. On the opposite side, scholars such as Polan, Booker and McGowan offer very critical readings of the film, precisely because they see it as the embodiment of the ‘Baudrillardian’ dematerialisation of reality and a capitulation to late capitalism’s annihilation of history. As already seen in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, several scholars have argued that it is a mistake to affirm that Tarantino’s films, and postmodern cinema in general, should be regarded as a radical break with

110

F. PAGELLO

classical narrative (that is, with Hollywood cinema). Many contemporary films, if not entirely Tarantino’s, have a strong narrative structure of the most classical kind. Even films that apparently display the most dramatic disruption of linear narrative (and the three-, or four-act, structure) are in fact building on them. In spite of their disagreement, both Howley (2004) and David Roche (2018: pp. 161–169) stress that the non-linear structure of Tarantino’s films does not actually diminish the role of traditional narrative within them. Howley’s analysis is interesting here because it entirely rejects the postmodern reading of Pulp Fiction as characterised by an achronological logic. For this scholar, the film is indeed still classical. The structure and resolution of each single narratives is perfectly compatible with Thompson’s account of contemporary classical narrative (even though she actually excludes Pulp Fiction from this category, see Howley 2004; Thompson 1999: 341). More directly linked to my own argument, however, is Roche’s approach, which relates to both Bordwell’s concept of ‘intensified continuity’ and a more nuanced understanding of the idea of ‘post-classical cinema.’ Roche describes Tarantino’s style as a post-classical combination of (American) classical cinema with (European) modern cinema. As a result, Pulp Fiction fruitfully combines different approaches, so that even the more contemplative moments serve some narrative purposes and display the mark of the author’s reflexive poetics. Finally, the interaction between these different aspects conveys a specific politics of representation, particularly as concerns a certain approach towards gender and racial identities (Roche 2018). My own perspective will differ from all these analyses insofar as it builds on Jameson’s dialectical theory of postmodernism, as well as Rancière’s own version of a ‘dialectical’ aesthetics. From this perspective, it is no surprise that the postmodern, post-structuralist framework adopted by Booker, the Brookers, Constable (and, from a different perspective, by McGowan) insists on the anti-dialectical aspects of post-classical cinema, valorising difference over repetition. Equally logical is that the ‘classicist’ perspective proposed by Howley ends up partially obscuring the complex dialectics at the core of the classical itself. In both cases, in fact, time is seen through one of two radically alternative models: either it is regarded as the domain of radical difference, or it is seem the realm of repetition.29 As said earlier, my own argument is indeed closer to Roche’s, with its productive decision to emphasise the coexistence of opposed influences in Tarantino’s cinema. His analyses and interpretations, however, reach different conclusions than mine, as he consistently valorises films

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

111

such as Pulp Fiction as a successful amalgamation of these disparate materials and approaches—so that that problem of postmodernism’s attacks on the work’s unity and ‘meaning’ is entirely discarded.30 In what follows, following the Jamesonian framework discussed above, I will pursue a different path. Focusing of the issue of time, I concentrate not on the successful balance between linear narrative and anti-linear narrative seen as two different ways of representing temporality: on the contrary, I want to highlight that Tarantino’s cinema is based, instead, on affirming the constant tension between different dimensions of temporality itself (Jameson 2009: 584–585). Jameson’s complex theory of the relationship among time, space, narrative and history in postmodern culture immediately shows its relevance here. In particular, it is useful to go back to the final chapter of Valences of the Dialectic where he clarifies his approach to the representability of time and affirms, on the basis on Ricoeur’s work on Time and Narrative, that it is (only) through narrative that time can appear in both its abstract and historical dimension. As mentioned earlier, Jameson also relies here on his dialectical reading of Braudel’s historiography. For both Ricoeur and Braudel, history becomes representable only at—and as—the intersection of different temporalities. In Jameson, moreover, Braudel’s the long, mid and short durées are linked to (Ricoeur’s) different levels of the ‘operation of emplotment,’ that is, the work of narrative (Jameson 2009: 530). Contrary to postmodern/Nietzschean attempts to think of a purely spatial experience, Jameson does emphasise both the complexity and the crucial function of storytelling: Emplotment has by now, however, absorbed cognitive connotations from its association with historiography; and the gamble is that it can now be grasped as an activity of construction and the production of a new reality: an enterprise with at least as much dignity and practical value as, say, the Freudian talking cure. (Jameson 2009: 530)

For Jameson, therefore, narrative can be seen as a form of praxis, as he consider psychoanalysis, like Marxism, a ‘unity-of-theory-and-practice’ (Jameson 1991: 333, 2016: 147).31 Also in this case, it is thus possible to employ Jameson’s dialectical understanding of postmodern cinema to highlight the ability of works such as Pulp Fiction in making the contradiction of postmodernism to emerge, in particular as concerns the key issue of the spatialisation of time.

112

F. PAGELLO

To further support my argument, before offering my analysis of a few aspects of Pulp Fiction, I want also to recall here my discussion of Tarantino’s cinema through Rancière’s aesthetic theory in the previous chapter. As I have stressed there, Rancière sees cinema as a dialectical form in which narrative is both preserved and ‘thwarted’ through the presentation of images ‘as things,’ and through a deconstruction of the classical rules prescribing how the world has to be represented and how the hierarchy between reality and its recreation must be preserved. My examination of time in Pulp Fiction builds on Rancière’s approach since I argue that the film juxtaposes sequences that represent time through the obvious signs of the act of narration with sequences that abolish temporality through a complete suspension of the classical mode of narration. By maintaining this tension, rather than suppressing it, the film touches on the peculiar historicity of postmodernism in which the reconciliation of space and time seems to have been realised only through the suppression of time and (meta)narratives and, yet, the persistence of (meta)narratives proves that such a ‘real illusion’ is also an ideological fantasy that can be properly revealed through the work of aesthetics.32 Viewing and Listening to Time in Pulp Fiction As a result of adopting this perspective, I look at the editing of different sequences instead of the overall narrative structure of the film. In fact, if Pulp Fiction seems to focus on a radical spatialisation of time in which temporality and narrative become less central, it is perhaps less because of the film’s non-linear structure than because of several moments in which we witness to an almost complete suspension of the process of storytelling while the flow of images and sound takes over. One such case is the long take describing Vincent’s walk at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, whose narrative function is inexistent and—subtracted from the rest of the film—would result in the equivalent of the shooting of an art installation. The same is true for the ‘silent’ shots of Vincent and Mia in the scene discussed above. While also relevant from a narrative and thematic standpoint, contributing to describe the characters and becoming the very topic of conversation in the following scene, a 30second-long sequence such as this is something rather unique in American mainstream cinema and definitely represents a rupture in the narrative flux of the film.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

113

In fact, Pulp Fiction (as all of Tarantino’s films) is constellated by such sequences of shots in which dialogue and action give way to images and sounds. The first sequence of the film ends with one of the most famous shots of the film: a still frame which last five seconds, before the film’s iconic opening credits and while the first, excited notes of Dick Dale’s Misirlou launches Pulp Fiction’s cult soundtrack. In the following scene, the long shot focused on the necks of Vincent and Jules provides another of such moments, but it is certainly by emphasising the stillness of the two characters during the shooting, also matched with an unexpected use of the lens flare, that Tarantino introduces one of the clearest examples of suspension of the narrative, right at the climax of what could have been an hectic action sequence. A number of similar situations also occur in the next section of the film, Vincent’s and Mia’s ‘date,’ including the famous shot of Uma Thurman’s feet, the square that she draws with her hands on the surface of the screen, and so on. These moments are, of course, sequences of pure pictorial creation, which arrest the narrative and halt or slow down time so that pure space can emerge. More extended music sequences explicitly interrupt the narrative and temporal flow in the first of the film’s three episodes. This segment is also the one in which a non-dialectical spatialisation of time seems most pervasive on all levels, whereas the following episodes are complicated by the appearance of other forms of temporality. In fact, it is in the story of Vincent’s and Mia’s night out that the we witness the representation of a day in the lives of a number of characters whose experience of the world looks the closest to a Baudrillardian description of contemporary America. Vincent, Mia, Lance and his flatmates are indeed all drug addicts (unlike the main and secondary characters in Jules’s and Butch’s episodes), an obvious metaphor for the postmodern form of subjectivity. To this thematic and narrative content, Tarantino adds a few, crucial sequences in which the story actually completely stops and the film focuses on a combination of images and sounds, a modulation of movement and stillness, accompanied by the two temporal arts that entertain the most dialectical relationship with space: dance and music. Even before meeting Mia, who is presented as a passionate dancer and a music lover, Vincent is the protagonist of a sequence in which music is completely dominant for the first time in the film, opening credits aside. This is the sequence in which Vincent shoots himself some heroin and drives to Mia’s house, while in the soundtrack plays the atmospheric 1963 instrumental surf track Bullwinkle Part II by The Centurians. The

114

F. PAGELLO

sequence is one minute long and presents a parallel editing of the heroin being prepared and shot in Vincent’s arm with a few static images of him driving his fashionable convertible car. The narrow framing alternates between the details of the action and Vincent’s close-up, the lighting is extremely dim, the focus lies entirely on the foreground of the shots. A true example of the influence of music video on Tarantino’s cinema— arguably one of the best examples of the aestheticisation (and, yes, the ‘coolness’) of 1990s postmodern cinema—this sequence is also the most explicit moment in which the director interrupts the narrative flow of his film, presenting the viewer with a direct experience of the spatialisation of time. The segment of the film devoted to Mia’s and Vincent’s encounter contains other sequences where music is dominant and the images only offer a play of surfaces and volumes. These are the two dance scenes, in both of which Mia is the protagonist—in the second case, together with Vincent. In these and numerous other parts of the films it is clear that we are confronted with a complete spatialisation of time and an absolute forgetting of the dimension of history. The setting of these sequences in hyper-nostalgic and vintage locations such as Mia’s apartment and the Jack Rabbit Slim’s would be telling enough, but the addition of the element of drugs in the sequence described above indicates an even stronger connection to this theme. On the other hand, however, a very different type of temporality is represented in the rest of the film. Peter and Will Brooker, Howley and Roche, among others, all highlight the importance of the stories told in Pulp Fiction, so there is no need to insist on this aspect here. Suffice it to say that the film tells three different stories in their entirety, that is, from the beginning to the end (‘although not necessarily in this exact order,’ as famously argued by Godard—a saying certainly well known to Tarantino). I will thus focus here on a specific representation of the very act of narrating that is included in the film. The prologue to the episode entitled ‘The Gold Watch’ is indeed another of the most cited scenes of Pulp Fiction. Not only is Christopher Walken’s monologue about the story of the father and the grandfather of the young Butch (Bruce Willis) one of the most memorable of the film, it is also one of its obvious reflexive moments. For my argument, the scene is interesting because it is at odds with the form and the content of the sequences discussed above. Instead of the domination of music, here we have a total dominance of the word.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

115

In place of the close shots, the shallow focus, the relatively fast editing, we only have a few, still long takes focusing on the figures of Willis and Walken, completely still, and whose faces and bodies are clearly framed in the context of the space they inhabit through the use of deep focus. More importantly, the word and the bodies are carefully telling and listening to a story, or rather, a series of interconnected (micro-)stories that are all linked to a broader history, that of the American wars since WWII. It is therefore through the very act of narration (made of words and images) that time is here the central protagonist, even if the scene is set in an obviously postmodern space—ostensibly the living room of lower-middle class, single-mother household in a white suburb during the early 1960s. This scene is also striking because of the tension between parody and characterisation. The focalisation on the performance of storytelling is not only a highly reflexive and satirical take on American war cinema, and chauvinist rhetoric in general, but also a personal story of mythical proportion that provides Butch’s character with the richest background that Tarantino had so far written for any of his characters. The length of the sequence—more than four minutes—is itself significant and certainly unusual for such a static scene in a Hollywood production. Furthermore, Walken’s story is also the very motif for the dramatic events that occur in this episode. In general, scholars have emphasised the overall classical construction of Butch’s episode (Howley 2004; Roche 2018), but it is interesting to recall here in particular Gallafent’s psychoanalytic reading of Butch’s storyline to highlight that all these interpretations attend to aspects of temporality that are generated by this specific sequence (Gallafent 2006: 21–29). Walken’s monologue is indeed the intrusion of a radically different time in Pulp Fiction’s otherwise perfectly postmodern world. The story of the traumatic experience of his forefathers in WWI, WWII and Vietnam represents the invasion of the immobile time of the suburbs (and the animated television shows that Butch is watching in the scene’s opening). Finally, of course, the very presence of the veteran brings forward another temporality, that of an embodied, perceivable memory. In this juxtaposition of pure spatialisation of time and pure narrative time we locate the specific representation of temporality and, perhaps, even of the historicity of the film, whose release in 1994 coincided with the climax of postmodern rhetoric about the end of history. The critical debates between different interpretations of the story of Jules’s ‘redemption’ can be also reassessed from this perspective. For many, the

116

F. PAGELLO

character’s trajectory cannot be taken seriously; as seen in elsewhere, Polan argues that it should not be interpreted at all, as none of the events narrated in the film have any actual meaning (see infra, p. 10). For many other critics, however, Jules’s actions and words do point to a significant change in his ethical views, and the audience is invited to ponder his fate as much as the meaning of his narrative arc. The comedic, even parodic, ‘form’ of the story of the gangster being ‘converted’ to a spiritual life is not a dismissal of its ‘content:’ it simply conveys the awareness of the postmodern, that is, sceptical society from which it happens to emerge. As I have argued above, the two interpretive approaches are both legitimate, since Jules’s story (spread over two separate sections of the film) is constellated by moments of suspension. On the one hand, we have fleeting sequences of pure spatialisation of time, such as the aforementioned scenes of the burger, the shots of Jules’s and Vincent’s necks waiting for the action to start, and the stillness and the lens flare during the shooting itself. On the other hand, Jules’s episode must be also regarded as the one in which the novelistic writing of the film and, particularly, the centrality of its peculiar style of dialoguing come to the fore. If Vincent’s and Mia’s segment is dominated by music and Butch’s by a particular kind of action, the word is at the centre of the stage in Jules’s scenes. Language, of course, is the very matter of narrative. The dialogues and the monologue in Pulp Fiction’ s final scene are indeed proof of the centrality of the act of narrating in the film. It is, of course, a complex type of storytelling, one in which a key role is played by the description of a setting, the expression of the characters’ opinions through the anecdotes they recount and the representation of their ability to elaborate logical plans to face a certain situation. Jules’s ‘conversion’ happens in a similar linguistic context, and it is obviously a rather incongruous topic of conversation for characters that we have seen discussing, just before assassinating two people, the name of McDonald’s sandwiches in France, the production models of television series and the sexual significance of foot massaging. This kind of topics is, of course, the (stereo)typical products of postmodern culture, seen as purely consumerist and hedonistic. If the film only included such conversations, it would definitely qualify as the perfect staging of the Baudrillardian concept of capitalist hyperreality (see infra, pp. 9–10, 16–17, 72, 87). Nevertheless, the sudden change of topic in Jules’s dialogues after the shooting and the consequential modification of his behaviour (including offering a new interpretation of his monologue,

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

117

in both its literal and abstract senses)33 make such reading incomplete. This change introduces a different temporality in the arc of the character (which, of course, is already juxtaposed to that of the other characters in this as well as in the other two episodes). What is most important, moreover, is that Jules’s redemption is not actually shown in the film: in fact, Tarantino does not represent any images of the new life that Jules is saying he will embrace. But no such representation is required as relates to the dimension of temporality: what matters is not whether the change is represented directly, but rather that its very possibility does emerge from the juxtaposition of different temporalities, which shakes a situation that appeared to be stuck in one single temporality. To argue that Pulp Fiction is based on such multiplication of interrelated temporalities, rather than on the simple dissolution of the linear time, implies that it is possible to adopt a Jamesonian approach to think about the film’s peculiar representation of time. Crucially, such perspective highlights the novelistic nature of the film. This was, in fact, Tarantino’s declared goal with the adoption of a non-linear structure for Pulp Fiction, whose narrative form was inspired Salinger’s novels in particular (Peary 2014: 50, 54, 71). By presenting the story—in fact, multiple stories – in non-chronological order, he was explicitly importing into mainstream cinema something that he considers well established in the field of literature. In the many interviews in which he addressed the topic, particularly but not exclusively in relation to Pulp Fiction, Tarantino never presented his use of non-linear structure as something particularly innovative: I wanted to break up the narration, not to be a wise guy, a show guy, but to make the film dramatically better that way. If I pulled it off, I got a resonance, so I liked the idea of giving the answers first, getting the questions later. Novels do that all the time, but when they make novels into films, the stuff that is most cinematic, that’s what usually goes. A novelist would think nothing about starting in the middle. And if characters in a novel go back and tell past things, it’s not a flashback, it’s just telling a story. I think movies should benefit from the novel’s freedoms. (Peary 2013: 23)

Rancière, Jameson and Tarantino, albeit in different ways, all address the issue of time and narrative in contemporary postmodern culture through a similar understanding of the nature of cinema, and of its relation to

118

F. PAGELLO

the (modern) form of the novel. The spatialisation of time is identified in various part of the film text, both in the style and the content. At the same time, however, sequences of pure storytelling, which are themselves made of a multiplicity of temporal layers, are juxtaposed to purely spatial sequences to usher in the dialectical dimension of time. In Rancière’s terms, this is what produces aesthetic images, in which the tension between historical and non-historical time is revealed. In Jameson’s terms, this superimposition of stasis and change, as well as of different diegetic and historical temporalities, is what allows the dimension of the film’s historicity to emerge from that apparent blocking of history that is postmodernism. While Pulp Fiction does not envision any progressive future of collective emancipation, we might argue that this is not because it doesn’t represent correctly its times. Quite to the contrary, the film’s impossibility to represent any utopias could only be based on the deepest realisation of the limits of its actual historical context: 1994 America, at the very apex of ideological domination of postmodernism.

Notes 1. It is extremely interesting to notice here what Tarantino wrote in the screenplay of the film, to present his concept of this set: ‘In the past six years, 50’s diners have sprung up all over L.A., giving Thai restaurants a run for their money. They’re all basically the same. Decor out of an “Archie” comic book, Golden Oldies constantly emanating from a bubbly Wurlitzer, saucy waitresses in bobby socks, menus with items like the Fats Domino Cheeseburger, or the Wolfman Jack Omelette, and over prices that pay for all this bullshit. But then there’s JACK RABBIT SLIM’S, the big mama of 50’s diners. Either the best or the worst, depending on your point of view’ (Tarantino 1994). Tarantino’s discussion of the whole scene in his interviews is remarkably suited to support the argument laid out throughout this book: ‘I love visual pop art and that’s why I love the big screen, which does it justice. My idea is that you make a color film which is really in colors, where the red is red, blue blue and black black. Primary colors. But I don’t like flat lighting. For my two films my head cameraman, Andrzej Sekula, and I used 50 AMC film which has the slowest emulsion there is. It requires a huge amount of light, but it’s not the least bit grainy, and the image is as clear as crystal. I’m happiest with the results in Pulp Fiction. The colors are so bright they jump right out at you! (…) In the dance hall, there’s an explosion of color with all those lyrical posters of fifties films, the convertibles and the shots of Los Angeles streets on the video monitors. And also the fake Marilyn Monroe

3

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

119

and Mamie Van Doren. It was like a huge cinematic effect within the film. This set was built entirely in a warehouse in Culver City. My set designer, David Wasco, oversaw every detail in this scene from the menus to the drinks they served, even the matches. We spent a good part of the film’s budget on this scene. Of course, the danger is to fall so much in love with the set that you get entirely caught up in it rather than paying attention to the relationship between Vincent and Mia [Uma Thurman]. That’s why I initially wanted to follow Vincent’s entrance with a travelling shot so he could discover the restaurant at the same time we did; then he sits down and talks with Mia for twenty minutes. The subject of the film is not Jack Rabbit Slim’s but what happens between these two characters. That’s why during their conversation there are no shots of the set’ (Peary 2013: 58–59). Jameson clarifies that his doubts about the opportunity of distinguishing a new cultural phase were dispelled by the publication of Mandel’s work, although the term ‘late capitalism’ (or ‘neo-capitalism,’ or even the more ideologically charged ‘post-industrial society’) had been used by other authors who significantly contributed to his theoretical development well before the 1970s (e.g. the Frankfurt School). For Jameson, Mandel’s book was crucial insofar as it rooted this definition in an economic analysis of three phases of capitalism, corresponding to the three Industrial Revolutions—the third being that of electronics, coinciding with what he calls the stage of ‘multinational capitalism’ (Jameson 1991: 35–36, 400). In a more recent interview, Jameson stated his continuous preference for this term, while indicating ‘finance capitalism’ as a more precise definition: ‘Late capitalism is the term I got from Ernest Mandel, and I think it’s a good term for it. It has some suggestive overtones. Certainly finance capital is a much more precise way of underlining what’s unique about this combination of communications and finance and abstraction that’s taken over the system of postindustrial production’ (Jameson 2016: 153). ‘Postmodernism is the substitute for the Sixties and the compensation for their political failure’ (Jameson 1991: XVI). In fact, it is obvious that from Jameson’s perspective Rancière’s discourse is entirely ‘postmodern,’ as its approach to history and political theory reveals the deep influence of one of the quintessential ‘post-structuralist’ philosophers: Michel Foucault. Here Jameson clearly distances himself from any nostalgic view of history, dialectics or modernism: ‘Dialectical history, to be sure, affirmed that all history worked (…) on its left foot, as it were, progressing, as Henry Lefebvre once put it, by way of catastrophe and disaster; but fewer ears heard that than believed the modernist aesthetic paradigm, which was on the point of being confirmed as a virtual religious doxa when it unexpectedly vanished without a trace’ (Jameson 1991: XI).

120

F. PAGELLO

7. In relation to the history of cinema, Jameson has offered the most detailed development of such an approach in the essay ‘The Existence of Italy,’ included in Signatures of the Visible (1992b). 8. Realism corresponds to the ‘cultural logic’ of the First Industrial Revolution, and modernism to the Second Industrial Revolution (Jameson 1991: 35–36). 9. As discussed later in this chapter, it is indeed curious that Booker decided to open his book and his presentation of Jameson’s ideas with a discussion of Blue Velvet in such terms: Jameson’s article about this film (explicitly mentioned by Booker) is perhaps one of the best example of his much more nuanced (and dialectical) analyses of postmodern culture in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson 1991: 279–296). 10. “Contemporary American popular culture is, in fact, filled with criticism of capitalism, and indeed cultural objects are almost obliged to carry an anticapitalist message in order to appear ‘cool.’ This phenomenon is surely the result not of the overwhelming power of anticapitalist ideas in our contemporary context but of their overwhelming impotence. Furthermore, capitalism itself is informed by a revisionist ideology that demands constant change and reform, in line with the drive for innovation that drives the consumer economy. Thus, a simple criticism of the evils of capitalism, without proposing socialism as a legitimate alternative, is perfectly consistent with capitalism itself and poses no ideological threat’ (Booker 2007: 45–46). It must be said that Booker ultimately praises the creativity of Tarantino’s cinema, as proven by this passage, taken from the Conclusion of his book: ‘The films discussed in this volume – made by such illustrious directors as Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Joel and Ethan Coen, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg – certainly indicate that creativity is alive and well in the world of postmodern film, however weak that film might be in terms of political critique” (2007: 187). 11. As Gallafent points out (2006: 70), the film makes clear, to the very attentive viewer, that the building had been used as a morgue. 12. In several interviews, Tarantino’s has insisted on how the theme of paranoia was at the centre of Reservoir Dogs, and it was inspired by Carpenter’s The Thing (1980), which is also the explicit model for The Hateful Eight . 13. For Jameson’s discussion of experimental video as ‘one of its strongest and most original, authentic form’ of postmodernism see Jameson 1991, p. 96. 14. In a sense, it might possible to think of Reservoir Dogs as a film which exacerbates the postmodern accumulation of stimuli, signifiers and references on the level of dialogues (and/or of the soundtrack in general) but works on a very different—much more restrained—way on the level

3

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

121

of the mise en scène. In this specific tension, another form of the dialectical tension posited by Rancière as crucial for the creation of an aesthetic image could be located. Not coincidentally, Clint Burnham offered such reading in his 1995 book The Jamesonian Unconscious, whose cover uses a frame from the Reservoir Dogs . As discussed in the Introduction and again in Chapter 4, the same was obviously already the goal of Jackie Brown. The difference, of course, is precisely that of the ‘period’ setting and the explicit address of political phenomena such as World War II and the Civil War. One of the clues on which the character of Samuel Jackson insists is the presence of a racist sign in Minnie’s haberdashery’s, indicating that Mexican people are not welcome. In fact, the film was in preproduction when the Ferguson riots started as results of the killing of Michael Brown on 10 August 2014. Also considering Tarantino’s subsequent involvement in the protests against police violence (his first, and last, public statement about any contemporary political debate), it this hard to miss how the Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight indicate his desire to thoroughly address a topic that would become gradually more and more debated during the last decade, up to the violent outbreak of the Black Lives Matter movement in May 2020 in response to another killing of a black man by the hand of the police, that of George Floyd in Minneapolis. See Jameson’s 1977 article on Dog Day Afternoon, Burnham’s discussion of Reservoir Dogs (Burnham 1995: 190–192) and again on Jameson’s theory, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the gangster film (Burnham 2016). Of course, gangster movies have been seen as overt allegories of the history of twentieth-century American capitalism since their first appearance in the 1930s. A similar argument is developed, building on the same theoretical and methodological premises, in Polan’s later monograph about The Sopranos. See ‘Totality as Conspiracy’ in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson 1992a). See ‘Nostalgia for the Present’ in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson 1991). Ibid. ‘Ricoeur’s patient and extensive demonstrations suggest, not only that Time can never be represented (a conclusion already reached by Kant), but also that the gap between cosmological and existential or phenomenological time can never be closed by philosophical conceptualization, but remains, at whatever level of complexity, an aporia resistant to mere thinking. The narrative view then presupposes a scepticism about solutions, which nonetheless places a premium on the rigorous demonstration of their impossibility’ (Jameson 2009: 530).

122

F. PAGELLO

25. As already argued infra (p. 10), Polan explicitly rejects Peter and Will Brooker’s ‘hermeneutic’ approach to the film, whereas Constable and Roche strongly approve it. In fact, all of these authors agree that the narrative structure of the film is possibly the starting point for the analysis. In what follows, I will show how I believe this perspective might be challenged and the core dynamic of the film can be seen instead in the alternation of narrative and non-narrative moments, on which the nonlinear structure does not have any particular effect. While important on a ‘purely’ aesthetic and emotional level, its ‘meaning’ (or lack thereof) should be assessed in combination with this other, central feature. 26. Vincent dies during the second episode (‘The Gold Watch’) but comes back, as nothing happened, in the final section of the film. 27. These two films, according to McGowan, ‘disrupt linearity in order to show what time cannot ameliorate: (…) no amount of time that passes can deliver us from the ontological and structural trauma that founds our being as subjects. Insofar as Pulp Fiction invests itself in the creation of the new, it attempts to escape this founding trauma, and this attempt has the effect of multiplying the trauma rather than eliminating it’ (2011: 57). 28. The reference to Negri and other Italian theorists, beside its explicit political value, is particularly relevant here for one specific reason. These contemporary political thinkers are discussed by McGowan in relation to the theoretical debate concerning globalisation and the theme of the spatialisation of time in late capitalism. McGowan’s analysis of Tarantino’s treatment on time in Pulp Fiction can therefore be directly contrasted with Jameson’s different approach to the same topic. For McGowan, the spatialisation of time implies that any radical politics must fully embrace the dimension of atemporality (McGowan 2011). For Jameson, however, the objective is the different: to make possible the representation of time and history in a society and a culture which have forgotten how to think historically. 29. The case of McGowan is of course different. First of all, building on Zizek’s Hegelianism, his goal is to accuse postmodern cinema (e.g. Pulp Fiction) of being ideological, precisely because of its anti-dialectical nature: for McGowan, postmodernism ideologically affirms time and difference in order to reject the atemporal conception of truth, based instead on repetition. Such discourse is clearly at odds with Brooker’s and Constable’s. Secondly, McGowan praises other contemporary filmmakers such Lynch and Nolan, arguing that their cinema display a strong dialectical logic that is instead entirely absent in Tarantino (McGowan 2007, 2014): in those cases, post-classical cinema offers a representation of subjectivity compatible with Hegelian philosophy, which makes this conception entirely different from the ‘neo-classical’ one proposed by Bordwell and

3

30.

31.

32.

33.

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

123

supported by Howley. For a completely opposite and thoroughly Hegelian and Zizekian take of Tarantino see Toth (2018). More precisely, Roche (2018) supports very clearly his argument by building of the work of Linda Hutcheon, which is of course the source of the affirmative postmodernism developed by Constable (2015). Interestingly enough, however, Roche completely ignores the whole issue of postmodernism and concentrates exclusively to Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, parody and cultural politics. “The dialectic is in any case not exactly a philosophy in that sense, but rather that peculiar other thing, a ‘unity of theory and practice.’ Its ideal (which famously involves the realization and the abolition of philosophy all at once) is not the invention of a better philosophy that – in opposition to all of G¨odel’s well-known laws of gravity – seeks to do without premises altogether, but rather the transformation of the natural and social world into a meaningful totality such that ‘totality’ in the form of a philosophical system will no longer be required” (Jameson 1991: 333). On the ‘reality’ of ideological ‘illusions’ see also see also the writings of Slavoj Žižek, for instance in The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York, Verso 1989, pp. 30, 45–47, 58–60. Jules interprets (performs) the monologue for a second time during the final scene of the movie. At the same time, he also gives a different interpretation of the meaning of the long quote (supposedly extracted) from the Bible. As in the programmatic opening scene of Reservoir Dogs , Jules even offers an encompassing, self-reflexive discussion of his interpretative method, and provides a history of its development over time.

References Anderson, Perry. 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. New York: Verso. Barlow, Aaron. 2010. Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotexte. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bazin, André. 2005. What Is Cinema?. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Booker, Keith M. 2007. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Cinema and Why It Makes Us Fell So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bordwell, David. 2007. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand. 2008 [1957]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

124

F. PAGELLO

Brooker, Peter, and Will Brooker. 1996. ‘Pulpmodernism: Tarantino’s Affirmative Action.’ In Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the Literature Media Divide, eds. Deborah Cartmell et al. London: Pluto Press. Buccheri, Vincenzo. 2009. Pulp Fiction. In Quentin Tarantino, ed. Vito Zagarrio. Venezia: Marsilio. Buckland, Warren, and Thomas Elsaesser. 2014. Studying Contemporary American Cinema: A Guide to Movie Analysis. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Burnham, Clint. 1995. The Jameson Unconscious. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burnham, Clint. 2016. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street. London: Bloomsbury. Constable, Catherine. 2014. Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and ‘The Matrix Trilogy’. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Constable, Catherine. 2015. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics. New York: Wallflower. Copjec, Joan. 1994. The Phenomenal/Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir. In Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso. Debord, Guy. 1967. La societé du spectacle. Paris: Buschet/Chastel. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Paris: Seuil. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2017. Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner. London: Bloomsbury. Fukayama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Perennial. Gallafent, Ed. 2006. Quentin Tarantino. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Greene, Richard, and K. Silem Mohammad (eds.). 2007. Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy. New York: Open Court. Howley, Kevin. 2004. Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction. In Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, May. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 2002. Postmodern Afterthoughts. Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 37 (1): 5–12. Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1975. Class and Allegory in Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as Political Film. College English 38 (8): 843–859. Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture. Social Text 1: 130–148. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious. New York: Verso.

3

SPACE, TIME AND DIALECTICS

125

Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Foreword to François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992a. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992b. Signatures of the Visible. London and New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson. Social Text 34: 2. Jameson, Fredric. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. London and New York. Lefevbre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lyotard, François. 1979. The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1974. Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books. McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press. McGowan, Todd. 2011. Temporality After the End of Time. In Out of Time: The Ethic of Atemporal Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McGowan, Todd. 2014. The Fictional Christopher Nolan. Austin: University of Texas Press. Morsiani, Alberto. 2008. Pulp Fiction. Torino: Lindau. Morsiani, Alberto. 2016. Quentin Tarantino. Il regista che ha reinventato il cinema. Roma: Gremese. Peary, Gary. 2014. Quentin Tarantino Interviews: Revised and Updated. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Polan, Dana. 2000. Pulp Fiction. London: British Film Institute. Polan, Dana. 2008. The Sopranos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984–1988. Time and Narrative, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roche, David. 2018. Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.). 2001. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.

126

F. PAGELLO

Speck, Oliver C. (ed.). 2013. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and the Continuation of Metacinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Thompson, Kristin. 1999. Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toth, Josh. 2018. Historioplastic Metafiction: Tarantino, Nolan, and the ‘Return to Hegel’. Cultural Critique 99: 1–30. von Dassanowsky, Robert (ed.). 2012. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema. New York: Continuum.

CHAPTER 4

Subjectivity and Dialectics

Even before the first shot of Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) appears on screen, the audience can perceive the Bride’s presence, anticipating the viewer’s alignment with the character throughout the film. To be more precise, it is the Bride’s heavy breathing that the public hears while the opening quote— ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold. Old Klingon proverb’—is displayed on a black screen. Only after twenty seconds, a black-and-white close-up of Uma Thurman is finally revealed. Her beaten-up face, covered in blood, occupies the frame almost entirely. A dramatic light from the right-hand side of the screen makes the viewer aware that she is lying on a floor: she looks seriously injured and terrified. A cut introduces another close shot, which follows Bill’s boots taking five steps towards the woman with a parallel tracking camera movement. Finally, a second cut brings us back to the initial close-up of Thurman, while Bill starts delivering the first of many monologues he will give in the film: Do you find me sadistic? I bet I could fry an egg on your head about now, if I wanted to. No kiddo, I’d like to believe, even now, you’re aware enough to know there isn’t a trace of sadism in my actions… Okay – maybe towards these other jokers – but not you. No, kiddo, at this moment, this is me at my most masochistic.

Immediately after the Bride’s attempt to stop the violence, revealing to the viewer the deep connection between the two characters—‘Bill, I’m pregnant. It’s your baby’—the sound of a gunshot closes the scene, just © The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7_4

127

128

F. PAGELLO

before Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) starts over the film’s opening titles. As is the case with the brief sequence from Pulp Fiction discussed at the beginning of Chapter 2, these three shots contain a set of crucial elements that characterises not only Kill Bill but also Tarantino’s cinema as a whole. Some of the features are similar, if not identical, to those in the Pulp Fiction sequence: the use of the close-up; the careful orchestration of images, sounds and silences to build up the suspense while also carefully describing the relationship between the characters; the allusions to Leone and Spaghetti Westerns in the iconography and the style of the scene.1 Exactly as in that sequence, moreover, the mise en scène balances audiovisual enjoyment and dramatic effect, showing off the director’s ability to create both arresting images and intriguing characters. Other elements, however, point at something more specific to the theme(s) of Kill Bill and the topic of this chapter: subjectivity, conceived of as a dialectical phenomenon, appears here as a major concern of Tarantino’s cinema. This opening scene immediately presents the relationship between two characters in a way that mirrors the dialectical conflict that structures the film’s narrative. Two opposed perspectives are at the centre of our attention. On one hand, we are confronted with the image of a woman as both a fetishistic object to be looked at and an active subject returning the gaze of the viewer. At the very beginning, the sounds and the images clarify the state of coercion of this character, her state of passivity; at the end of this brief scene, however, her fierce expression2 and few words reveal that she represents for the other character much more than we could have expected and is not simply the victim of an anonymous predator. The Bride appears enslaved but not yet vanquished. On the other hand, the viewer’s point of view is explicitly linked to the male gaze, which provokes in the audience both the enjoyment and the discomfort of sharing this specific perspective. Bill controls the woman also through language, but his words about his ‘masochistic’ rapport with the Bride make clear one thing: that his violence is not directed against something he perceives as external to his own person but is a knowingly self-harming behaviour.3 What the sequence suggests, and comments upon, is therefore the clash between two contradictory subjective points of view, as well as the exposure of their own internal split: the process is indeed two-fold, highlighting the continuous dialectical reversal of each entity into its negative.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

129

First of all, the subject who is looking is immediately linked to what (or whom) she sees/lays eyes on. Both the Bride and Bill as lookers are connected to each other in a way that defines them and produces a (spiralling) movement of destruction (of the female subject) and selfdestruction (of the male subject). Everything but the two characters is eliminated from the scene4 : the Bride seems to exist only for the gaze of the male character—which is also that of the viewer—as much as the man seems wholly constituted by his obsessive and perverse focus on the woman. At the same time, however, each subject is revealed as torn from within. This is immediately visible in the image of the Bride, which is offered to the viewer as a pure spectacle, a sensational representation of attractive even if wounded femininity presented as a passive object; and yet, in spite (or because) of this, the Bride’s gaze is affirmatively addressed at the character that is looking at her. Bill’s look obviously embodies a strong subjective position, able to interpellate the character as much as the audience. Her impotence is thus not presented as something intrinsic but rather as the result of her position in relation to another, aggressive subject. Bill’s cool behaviour, on the contrary, immediately displays his frayed subjectivity by highlighting the contradiction between his words and appearance, on the one hand, and his brutal and admittedly self-harming actions and emotions, on the other. In the first two chapters of this book, I emphasised how Tarantino’s oeuvre strives to maintain a tension between the aesthetic features of the director’s audiovisual style and the narrative aspects of his works. This brief discussion of the opening sequence of Kill Bill intended to introduce the topic and the approach of the next two chapters, which examine more closely the themes and the characters linked to Tarantino’s aesthetics. While the first part of the book focused primarily on the audiovisual elements of the films, the second part will focus thus primarily on the narrative fabric of Tarantino’s movies in order to show how their characters and stories are integral to the writer-director’s conception of cinema. Central to this conception is what I see as Tarantino’s theoretical reflection on the emergence of subjectivity through a dialectical process, so that the narratives of his films can be analysed as the representation of its gradual unfolding.5 This approach openly challenges standard postmodernist readings of Tarantino’s work, as the nature and consistency of his narratives have often been questioned. Many critics have regarded his characters as the assemblage of stereotypical features taken from other films and popular

130

F. PAGELLO

genres, reducible to their ‘comic book’ appearance and amoral behaviour (Brancati 2014: 11, 119–126). In fact, in the context of the debate on postmodernism, even beyond the field of Film Studies, Tarantino’s characters are regularly cited as key examples of the crisis and even the epitome of postmodern anti-dialectical subjectivity, so that these figures have been too easily seen as the celebration of the power of performative identity and, thus, as the representation of the proliferation, hybridisation and virtualisation of identities in contemporary culture. In this sense, the characters of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction have also been seen as the ultimate embodiment of the post-Oedipian, ‘perverse’ subject (e.g. the sadistic Mr. Blonde, the drug addict Vincent Vega), which replaced the ‘hysterical’—and dialectical—subject of modernity. While these characters obviously depict this postmodern condition, I claim that most of Tarantino’s characters are also defined by their inclusion in highly structured social networks that regularly place them at the centre of complex sets of dialectical relationships. More often than not, a central (male) figure dominates over the other characters through oppressive means, setting in motion the attempts of the protagonist to free themselves. I argue, therefore, that Tarantino’s cinema ultimately rejects the postmodern celebration of the end of dialectical thinking and of its conception of subjectivity. To this end, Sect. 1 highlights some of the key aspects of Slavoj Žižek’s intervention in the fields of cultural and film theory that can be used to approach Tarantino’s films and postmodern cinema more broadly. Throughout his career Žižek has attacked postmodernism’s refusal of dialectical thinking and, particularly, of its intrinsic connection with the modern notion of subjectivity (Žižek 1989, 1992, 1999, 2012, 2014a, b). The Slovenian’s theorist, in fact, rebuts this perspective with the idea that (Hegelian) dialectics cannot be misconstrued as the foundation of a self-transparent consciousness or as a means to reconstitute an orderly, complete totality, as much of postmodern theory claims; on the contrary, Žižek insists that the crucial relationship between subjectivity and negativity in Hegel’s dialectics implies that reality is thought as based on a radical antagonism in the world and within the subject itself. In Sect. 1, I will thus indicate how Žižek’s writing, including his work on popular films and Hollywood directors, can help us approach Tarantino’s work from a different, stimulating angle. To conclude this first part, I will briefly explore how characters in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction can be analysed using this perspective.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

131

Sections 2 and 3 offer more extended analyses of two, later films in which, from my point of view, Tarantino seems to openly challenge those critics who saw in his work a celebration of postmodern conceptions of subjectivity. In this sense, the case of Jackie Brown (1997) is particularly revealing of Tarantino’s self-conscious activity as a sort of (film) theorist, as the film was written immediately after the worldwide success of Pulp Fiction, which certainly contributed massively to such readings of the poetics of the writer-director. The narratives of both Jackie Brown and Django Unchained (2012), analysed in the last section, describe processes of subjectivation activated by competing interpellations addressed to their protagonists and follow a series of dialectical reversals leading to the (always relative, and partially imaginary) emancipation of the main characters from the control of the Other. In both cases, Tarantino highlights how a process of subjectivation is central to his work, and that it is best understood through Hegel’s discussion of the dialectical relationship between master and slave. To conclude, I will stress the ‘dialectical’ approach shown by Tarantino in his appropriation of 1960s and 1970s exploitation cinema. His continuous interest in Spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation derives obviously from the ability of those films to rework in original ways many established topoi of classical Hollywood cinema. Somehow mirroring his characters’ processes of subject formation, the oeuvre of the writer-director draws from these types of films to embed itself in a series of relationships of power between different ‘subjects’ from which its ‘identity’ emerges through the constant negation and recombination of such hierarchies of genres and cultural contexts.

ˇ zek’s ˇ 1 Zi Dialectical Thinking, Postmodernism and Film Studies Each of the dozen books written by Žižek contains several savvy references to and provocative analyses of film sequences, plots or stylistic features. In his work, in fact, cinema plays a central role as an art and cultural phenomenon that aims to understand how contemporary Western society and culture are organised and, particularly, how our ideological and psychological subjectivity is informed by cultural artefacts and social practices. Not only has he devoted chapters, articles and a book to themes related to cinema,6 but he also coauthored two documentary films analysing cinema (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2006 and The

132

F. PAGELLO

Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, 2012, both directed by Sophie Fiennes). In all these works, the analysis of cinema’s stories and linguistic features aims to investigate how individual and collective subjects are entrenched in the social discourses propagated through the media, asking whether any resistance to the erosion of the modern, dialectical notion of subjectivity can still take place in the postmodern. Despite his vast production and global fame, the relationship between Žižek’s thinking and film studies is notoriously complicated (Flisfeder 2011, 2012). Film scholars and critics, in fact, have struggled to find in the writings of the Slovenian theorist a useful set of tools to discuss contemporary or classic films in the terms in which current academic scholarship is most interested.7 The reasons are multiple and range from Žižek’s own disinterest in engaging with more current topics of debate in the field to the concern that his work shows the risk of limiting the analysis of cinema to the application of an all-encompassing psychoanalytic method or an ideological interpretation of popular culture. Moreover, Žižek’s focus on thematic and textual analysis appeared untimely in a moment in which Film Studies were becoming more and more interested in historical and contextual studies, in the phenomenological, affective and cognitive experience of the viewers, and in the analysis of empirical data (Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Bordwell 2005). All of these factors have certainly contributed to the difficulty of engaging more thoroughly with Žižek’s work within the field of Film Studies. Consistently with my approach to Tarantino and the theorists discussed in the rest of the book, I would like to posit that the main reason for many film scholars’ discontentment with Žižek’s work lies in the insistence on a certain notion of theory which finds its main trait in the opposition between postmodern thinking and dialectical thinking.8 For example, it is possible to read in this sense the little impact of Žižek’s direct intervention in the debate about the methodological challenges for Film Studies—the first part of his book The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie´slowski Between Theory and Post-Theory (2001)—which presented itself as a response to David Bordwell’s and Noël Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996).9 In this essay, Žižek critiques Bordwell’s and Carroll’s positions in support of ‘post-theoretical’ approaches such as cognitivism, historicism and cultural studies as the expression of a postmodern attack against Marxist theory and, particularly, (Lacanian) psychoanalysis.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

133

Interestingly Žižek sees this postmodern turn as a rejection of an epistemological model that emphasises the dialectical consequences of the implication of the researcher’s subjectivity in its field of work (Žižek 2001: 14–16).10 The argument in favour of ‘post-theory’ is thus interpreted as an attempt to remove the political significance of the modern notion of subjectivity from academic debates: the rejection of dialectical theory would thus promote the idea of an allegedly ‘post-ideological’ space of research (see also Flisfeder 2011, 2012: 5–14). For Žižek, a dialectical approach to the notion of subjectivity is not only a necessary theme of research but also the methodological foundation for any serious epistemological debate in the Humanities. Žižek vs Postmodernism It is hard to miss the point that the beginning of Žižek’s career—at least in the global academic scene—coincides with the heyday of postmodern art and theory,11 and that his whole work presents itself as an explicit attack on the ideologies that emerge from this cultural area. As a matter of fact, one of the key reason for the popularity of Žižek depends on his being the only prominent theorist emerging in this period to propose and renew the theory of ideology, a concept that had been discredited by postmodern culture as a whole, from mainstream (neo-)liberal media to post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze.12 The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek’s very first book in English, and The Ticklish Subject (1999) are certainly the two most ambitious works in this first phase of Žižek’s global career13 and serve as bookends for his confrontation with the culture of postmodernism in a decade, the Nineties, that was certainly the climax of postmodern culture and found one of its most representative expressions in the work of Tarantino. While the impact of Žižek’s work in this period is also due to a revival of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the neo-Marxist criticism of ideology, throughout Žižek’s career these two threads are seen in relation to something else, that is, his work’s singular treatment of the postmodern assumptions about the dissolution of dialectical thinking. As I have argued in the previous chapter (infra, pp. 79–83), all critics and detractors of Tarantino’s work have, explicitly or implicitly, taken sides on the issue of the anti-dialectical nature of postmodern cinema, and, therefore, of Tarantino’s films. On the one hand, scholars such as

134

F. PAGELLO

Polan and Bookers adopt the Baudrillardian view of postmodernity as an anti-dialectical and nihilistic culture14 that manifests in the cynicism and political impotence of postmodern cinema. From this perspective, postmodern culture has evacuated the contradiction and conflicts of dialectics, making it ineffective. Building on Baudrillard and (more questionably) on Jameson—these scholars do not applaud the new regime. On the other hand, Peter and Will Brooker, Catherine Constable and David Roche have opposed this perspective, emphasising the power of postmodern metafiction as a politically meaningful act precisely because of its refusal of dialectical thinking. In fact, this second group of scholars have based their work on a radically anti-dialectical philosophy, the post-structuralism of Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Butler, often mediated by the postmodernist theory of Linda Hutcheon. What these positions have in common, therefore, is the idea that postmodernism has successfully deactived dialectical thinking, for instance, by supporting the spread of a culture of productive ‘perversion’ (a continuous striving towards enjoyment, which would be able to dissolve the mutual link between the Law and its transgressions). Žižek’s argument, however, bypasses both these perspectives as it attacks frontally this basic tenet of postmodernism. What Žižek emphasises in Hegelian dialectics is its radically disruptive nature, which is the main target of postmodern and poststructuralist theory. By affirming that Hegel is the philosopher of rupture rather than mediation—a controversial move15 —Žižek clearly attacks postmodernism’s anti-dialectical assumption at its very core: the point is not to oppose postmodernism and dialectics as two actual alternatives, but to show how the former misrepresented the latter as a conservative branch of thinking based on an idea of conciliation, overlooking its radical emphasis on irreducible contradictions. Žižek also rejects postmodernism’s insistence on the coming of a postideological dimension in which the modern radical (‘hysterical’) subject would submit to one of two fates. On the one hand, the modern subject would be replaced by the postmodern, post-political (‘perverse’) subject and society. On the other hand, subjectivity should be escaped altogether, seen as synonymous with the oppressive interpellation exercised by disciplinary and controlling institutions (according to post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, who are among the greatest opponents of Hegel’s dialectics). As mentioned above, from his first book (aptly titled The Sublime Object of Ideology) onward, Žižek has tried to

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

135

prove that even the apparently most ideology-free discourse activates subjectivation processes, and this activation might be both the evidence of ideological oppression and the only true opportunity to reverse this very oppression. This is the master–slave dialectics, and this way of turning upside down a certain discourse is of course not only intrinsically dialectical but also emblematic of the centrality of subjectivity to dialectical thinking. The theory of ideology is indeed focused on the way discourse produces subjectivity and insists on the subject’s relations with the Other as constitutive of any meaningful identity. As said earlier, poststructuralist thinkers with whom Žižek constantly engages have refused to develop the notion of ideology and rejected its very foundation in their attempt to undermine the modern idea of the subject (Žižek 1999; Vighi 2009). Advocating for the necessity of further developing the theory of ideology in explicit opposition to postructuralist philosophy is therefore one of the ways in which Žižek tries to reject postmodernism and its ideological meaning, as is fully stated in the book The Ticklish Subject that closes that important decade in the author’s career as well as in the history of postmodern debate. Here, Žižek argues that the problem with much of post-Heideggerian philosophy lies in its association of the modern subject with self-transparent rational consciousness, which has led postmodern thinkers to reject the modern notion of subjectivity altogether. For Žižek, however, any ambiguity in this regard had been addressed by Hegel’s foundation of his dialectics on criticism of Kant’s understanding of subjectivity. In fact, for Žižek, Hegelian dialectics posits the essence of subjectivity not as positive and absolute mastery of the world but rather as the disruptive power of the subject to self-contradict, that is, its continuous failing to understand itself as well as the world, often leading it to self-deception and even self-destruction: Hegel’s behest to conceive the Absolute ‘not only as Substance, but also as Subject’ denotes the exact opposite of what it seems to mean (the absolute Subject’s ‘swallowing’ - integrating - the entire substantial content through its activity of mediation): does not Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tell us again and again the same story of the repeated failure of the subject’s endeavour to realize his project in social Substance, to impose his vision on the social universe - the story of how the ‘big Other’, the social substance, again and again thwarts his project and turns it upside-down? (…)

136

F. PAGELLO

The Hegelian subject is nothing but the very movement of unilateral selfdeception, of the hubris of positing oneself in one’s exclusive particularity, which necessarily turns against itself and ends in self-negation. ‘Substance as Subject’ means precisely that this movement of self-deception, by means of which a particular aspect posits itself as the universal principle, is not external to Substance but constitutive of it. For this reason, the Hegelian ‘negation of negation’ is not the magic return to identity which follows the painful experience of splitting and alienation, but the very revenge of the decentred Other against the subject’s presumption: the first negation consists in the subject’s move against the social Substance (in his ‘criminal’ act which disturbs the substantial balance), and the subsequent ‘negation of negation’ is nothing but the revenge of the Substance (for instance, in psychoanalysis, ‘negation’ is the subject’s repression into the unconscious of some substantial content of his being, while the ‘negation of negation’ is the return of the repressed). (…) ‘Negation of negation’ presupposes no magic reversal; it simply signals the unavoidable displacement or thwartedness of the subject’s teleological activity. For that reason, insistence on the way in which negation of negation can also fail, on how the splitting can also not be followed by the ‘return to Self,’ therefore misses the mark: negation of negation is the very logical matrix of the necessary failure of the subject’s project - that is to say, a negation without its self- relating negation would be precisely the successful realization of the subject’s teleological activity. (Žižek 1997: 76–77)

In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, therefore, the model of the modern subject is found in figures that do not lead to any idea of a balanced, adjusted individual but to its (almost) exact opposite: its perfect embodiment is the hysterical subjects from whom Freud launched the psychoanalytical project of subverting the modern subject from within.16 Subjectivity, Negativity and Fantasy What this return to dialectics entails for our understanding of postmodern cinema becomes immediately clear by looking at the frequent filmic examples that Žižek offers to help his readers grasp his notion of subjectivity. Among many others, I will mention here two recurrent examples: the creature from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien, and David Lynch’s cinema as a whole (see, for example, Žižek 1999, 2007 and the film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema).

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

137

Certainly the most commercially successful expression of the sci-fi body horror of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Alien epitomises the sub-genre that embodied the postmodernisation of cinema, not only in the horror domain, precisely by staging the meltdown of stable notions of identity and subjectivity. As Žižek explains, his reading of the Hegelian conception of the subject emphasises that subjectivity emerges as a result of the human’s inability to fully recognise herself in something that comes from inside of her own body: something that is the subject and, yet, also appears to her as an absolute Other. In this sense, of course, Žižek emphasises his Lacanian approach to subjectivity, as the Alien in the film would show ‘what is in the subject more than herself.’17 The subject’s emergence is therefore one and the same with the expulsion of something that she recognises as her own; moreover, that which is expelled is indeed not a superfluous appendix but an intrinsic part of the subject. Žižek thus looks at films such as Alien to show how subjectivation occurs through the negation of the self’s supposed unity and transparency. In this operation, no matter how much positivity is produced, some pre-existing thing has to be negated in order to let the new appear. The same discourse continues in Žižek’s analysis of the work of Alfred Hitchcock—whose films are not only psychoanalytic studies18 but also an exploration of the dialectical logic of (post)modern subjectivity19 —as well as in his readings of films by David Lynch, a devotee to Hitchcock and certainly one of the most symptomatically postmodern filmmakers. As Žižek points out,20 even in Lynch’s most surrealistic and hallucinatory work, the representation of the collapse of subjectivity in postmodern culture does not imply its ultimate eclipse nor proves the inadequacy of dialectical thinking to understand contemporary culture and society. As Žižek shows, the revelation of the characters’ violent unconscious in Lynch’s films portrays subjectivity as a conflictual relation with an Other whose negation allows this very subject to emergence. Since this conflict-based subjectivity prevents the depiction of a society dominated by a self-transparent rationality, the inescapability of subjectivity is never associated with a dystopic situation in which subjects are under the total control of the new postmodern Big Other. On the contrary, subjectivity, in the form of self-negation, is precisely what stops this dystopia from happening. Žižek’s appreciation of Lynch’s overtly postmodern cinema indicates the former’s shared theoretical premise with the latter, showing

138

F. PAGELLO

what is at stake in the notion of subjectivity as conceived through a dialectical perspective. Closely building on the work of Žižek, Todd McGowan’s monograph on Lynch’s cinema perfectly demonstrates how in his films subjective fantasies are presented as both constitutive of reality and disruptive of it (McGowan 2011). As Žižek constantly repeats, in fact, the subject’s fantasies are not a superfluous addition to reality, something that could be subtracted from reality in order to see ‘things as they really are.’21 This is the crux of Žižek’s opposition to postmodern thinking, which has led him to focus on the inescapable role of ideology in every society22 and to articulate how the analysis of the (modern) process of subjectivation should still be valued and applied to contemporary culture in order not to fall prey to ideologies announcing the disappearance of ideology and subjectivity. Fantasy, whose modern roots can be found in Kant’s transcendental imagination,23 is at the same time what grounds the subject in reality and what can lead the subject to reject the reality she is facing.24 But what about Tarantino’s cinema? Aren’t his films much ironic, if not lighter, than the body horror of Alien or Lynch’s nightmares? Don’t they enter a world that, despite the complete domination of postmodern spectacle, somehow remains an almost orderly reality (consider the role of Marcellus Wallace and Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction)? Despite their apparent amorality, don’t some of his narratives offer gratifying revenge fantasies that satisfy the audience with stories of losers-whobecome-(super)-heroes (Jackie Brown, Kill Bill , Death Proof, Django Unchained)? The meaning of Tarantino’s films should become clearer by adopting Žižek’s perspective. This indecision, in fact, reveals the contradictory relationship between postmodernism and the issue of subjectivity. This false opposition between cynicism and euphoria is what embodies the persistence of dialectics and its relevance to this debate. In fact, Tarantino’s cinema lies at the centre of this tension, in the very place where postmodern perverse subjectivity seems to dissolve the ideological identifications of the subject—and, yet, it also makes them all the more powerful both when it succeeds in spreading an individualistic ‘post-ideology’ and when it makes room for the disruptive forces of individual and collective subjectivation. As I will claim in the following sections, the ultimate dialectical move in Tarantino’s filmography consists in his conscious embracing, after his first two films, of what appear as more narratives, which describe the

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

139

subjectivation and then emancipation of their protagonists. This shift immediately challenges the reception of his films as celebrations of the dissolution of modern subjectivity. However, while accomplishing this move, his revenge narratives also pushed against any representation of the subject as an affirmative phenomenon. Contrary to what some critics (including McGowan [2015]) have argued, Tarantino’s revenge fantasy in Django Unchained, like those in Kill Bill , Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds, does not reinforce a naive celebration of fantasy’s absolute power but rather forces the viewer to acknowledge the contradictory status of revenge fantasies precisely as fantasies. Tarantino with Žižek From what has been said above, it should be clear why, by drawing on Žižek’s thinking, I will try to argue that the fragmentation of time and narrative or the alleged explosion of reality into an anarchic proliferation of new (perverse) identities in Tarantino’s cinema can be examined as the effect, rather than the cause, of something more originary, which also defines the postmodern subject. Subjectivity, in fact, is what constitutes ‘reality’ as both a seemingly self-transparent, organic whole and as the actual combination of—and above all the clash between—the different subjective fantasies that make up reality. The postmodern rupture of chronological time and the rhetorical emphasis on the performance of identities have little to reveal to dialectical thinking, which has interpreted this process as the result of the full development of modern subjectivity. From Žižek’s point of view, a dialectical approach entails an understanding that the structure of ‘reality’ is produced by the conflict between different subjects in relation within a certain historical situation. Since in this context subjectivity coincides with a negativity that never ends in a peaceful balancing of its contradictions, the multiplication of such negative forces does not amount to as a simple, pacified mediation. Subjects do not simply know, want and then rationally try to find ways to master reality through negotiation (i.e. compromise) with other rational beings. On the contrary, social reality is the product of the conflict between subjects, and more fundamentally, between the subject and itself: proper modern subjectivity, for Žižek, emerges only when the hystericised subject encounters its own internal limitation, which is indeed the sign of its inscription in the sphere of the Other. The hysterical subject emerges

140

F. PAGELLO

as the name of the subject itself because only through the negation of the Other’s interpellation, through the refusal of completely identifying oneself with the Other’s desire, can subjectivity as such emerge. A short look into Tarantino’s filmography will show how this perspective can help us make sense of his narratives and characters and how it sheds light on the specific relationship the films establish between the viewer and the fictional world. The protagonists of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction find themselves embedded in a network of relationships in which none of them is the absolute master of their own reality. The plots of the aforementioned films seem to make quite the opposite point: the supposed masters (Joe Cabot, Marcellus Wallace, Ordell, Bill, Dr. Schultz and/or Calvin Candie) are unable to control their business; their subordinates (Orange, White, Blonde, Jules, Vincent, Mia, Butch, Jackie, the Bride, Django) are obviously unwilling or unable to perfectly align with the orders they receive. In any case, all of them are deeply connected to each other, and their relations are constitutive of their subjectivity as much as they contribute to creating the unsolid ground they all happen to cohabit. The same is true for the viewer. This multiplication of figures and conflicts does not provide any stable ground for the audience’s identification.25 Granted, the films do not present the same instability in the permanence of the individual’s identity as Lynch’s films—and they often offer the public the opportunity to take a clear stance for or against a certain character, for instance with the figures of Jackie Brown and Django Freeman. Nevertheless, in all Tarantino’s films, the narrative thread is articulated through different, opposing figures that fully make sense only if the viewer embraces the dialectical nature of each character’s relations with the other figures—starting from the relationship between the protagonists and the most powerful figures in these narratives. The close connections between the characters refer to the fundamental role of the (Big) Other, or the master, which affects the possibilities that are open to the subject’s action, including the affirmation of her own desire through the (Self-) negation of what the Other expects from her. While it is easier to identify the centrality of the master–slave dialectic in Jackie Brown and Django Unchained, in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction the idea that social reality is the result of the dialectical conflict between subjects is already at the core of the writer-director’s approach to contemporary culture. It is indeed paradoxical that a work such as Reservoir Dogs inaugurated the filmography of an author that, in the eyes of many

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

141

critics, would become in the span of a few years the quintessential example of postmodern cinema’s anti-dialectical representation of subjectivity26 : the film’s narrative matter is in fact a most blatant—almost didactic 27 — examination of its characters’ troubles with the process of (ideological) interpellation, their inherent struggle with their own identity and, more crucially, the foundation of this struggle in the (failure) of intersubjective relationships. If we look for a character to reflect the postmodern conception of subjectivity in the film, the best examples are arguably ‘Mr. Pink’ (Steve Buscemi) and ‘Mr. Blonde’ (Michael Madsen). Throughout the movie, Pink is the one who affirms the necessity to stick to the logic of professionalism. In the film, this logic is embodied in Joe Cabot’s (Lawrence Tierney) creation of a fictional name for each of the gangsters (‘Mr. Pink,’ ‘Mr. Orange,’ etc.), which represents the intent to establish clear boundaries between the subjects and their jobs, as well as between each worker and his colleagues. The subjectivity thus produced would be entirely defined by the identity they acquire in their professional status, and this should prevent any trouble arising from the confusion of different dimensions of reality, particularly those of the professional and the private. If this separation worked, the film would show a world in which the trouble with subjectivity would be solved by the ‘perverse’ willingness to fully identify with the fictional identity provided by the Other. The other side of such an approach is perfectly visible in the case of Mr. Blonde, the first of the many sadistic characters in Tarantino’s cinema, whose complete embracing of his ‘cool’ identity is revealed as something entirely different from the ideology professed by Pink. However, Mr. Pink explains that the only other member of the gang who, given his murderous behaviour, he cannot suspect of being the rat is precisely Mr. Blonde: therefore, professionalism and sadism are shown as two aspects of the postmodern subject that fully identifies with his symbolic role. But Pink and Blonde are not the leading characters of Reservoir Dogs . The film therefore cannot be said to affirm the ‘perverse’ attitude of these two characters. Quite to the contrary, the film investigates the necessary failure of the process of interpellation and the emergence of the radical negativity of the subject once it finds itself trapped in this forced ‘totalitarian’ regime. The narrative matter of Reservoir Dogs revolves around the catastrophic consequences of Mr. Blonde’s inability to act professionally and of ‘Mr. Orange’’s (Tim Roth) and ‘Mr. White’’s (Harvey Keitel) failure to stick to the fake identities provided by the patriarch, Joe Cabot,

142

F. PAGELLO

to guarantee the success of the robbery. Both individually and through their relationship, Mr. White and Mr. Orange are portrayed so as to foreground their (in)ability to perform what this obvious interpellation asks of them. At the beginning of the film, Pink harshly reproaches White precisely because of his decision to reveal his name to Orange, making it impossible to miss the centrality of this theme not only to the film’s theoretical discourse but also to its diegetic development. The deaths of all the characters directly result from his disclosure, because this leads, in turn, to the decision not to bring the wounded Orange to the hospital, which is what precipitates the final massacre in the warehouse.28 The ‘tragedy’ of the film, therefore, stems from the ability of the subject to oppose (negate) those fictional identities that would make the plan run smoothly as it should. As critics and scholars have noticed (Roche 2018: 151–153), a crucial section in Reservoir Dogs is the long ‘Commodore Story’ sequence, in which Orange is trained by his senior colleague in the art of acting. Orange seems to be good at the job, as stressed by this section, the longest and most celebrated of the three flashbacks29 structuring the film’s famous non-chronological narrative. But the sequence should not lead to the conclusion that the film is simply a celebration (or cynical acknowledgement) of the power of interpellation and performance. The flashback’s insistence on the importance of performance in sustaining identity must be thought alongside the tragic unfolding of the botched robbery. By highlighting the false promise that skill in performance will yield a successful professional life, Reservoir Dogs stresses the irresistible negative side of subjectivity. As soon as symbolic identity proves unable to shield the subject from his own fragility, exposing him to his interdependence with the rest of his community, the façade of social identity begins to corrode. The chain of events that brings Orange and White to their own (and everybody else’s) demise is indeed rooted in this discrepancy between the protection offered by identity and the conflict in which the subject is found. On the one hand, the brutal violence at the scene of the robbery provokes fear and panic in Orange; on the other hand, being caught with the helpless Orange elicits feelings of solidarity and responsibility in White. Once Orange is seriously wounded, his ability to stay in character breaks down as quickly as White’s feelings of friendship let him suspend his caution about exposing his identity in order to protect the outcome of the work they’re doing. Reservoir Dogs , therefore, highlights how the

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

143

power of subjectivity should not be first and foremost associated with the adoption of a stable symbolic identity in the realm of social relationships. Rather, this power should be understood as a response to a negative force that makes the subject proclaim that she is not what the Other commands her to (pretend to) be. The same pattern of interpellation and subversion is at the very core of Pulp Fiction: the subjection of the protagonists to the interpellation by the Other is followed by their sensational negation of this identification. Make no mistake: Pulp Fiction switches the register from that of the previous film, and this tone shift might have led to the association of Tarantino’s work with a cynical and yet entirely playful postmodernist sensibility. Of course, one of Reservoir Dogs ’ key features is the mixture of different tones, layering comedic elements with the dramatic events that constitute the plot; and yet, it is fair to say that if we were to compare only these two films, Tarantino’s first movie could be seen largely as a sort of (postmodern) tragedy, whereas the second might be seen as a comedy.30 Nevertheless, as it is fair to argue that Reservoir Dogs is not really or entirely a ‘tragedy,’ so it is easy to detect in Pulp Fiction, within the playful accumulation of ironic portraits of contemporary American culture and society, a rather different nuance in the narrative arcs of the two characters of Jules and Butch.31 Vincent Vega arguably became for many observers the epitome of Tarantino’s creatures as exemplary of some sort of postmodern ‘antisubjectivity.’ And yet, even in this character’s case, the representation of subjectivity is more complicated than several critics and scholars have claimed. Devoted to mindless enjoyment and constantly behaving—or risking to behave—beyond any moral or rational principle, Vincent is indeed also defined by a fundamental trait he shares in common with all the other main characters: they are dependent (as employees or otherwise) on Marcellus Wallace, who is clearly depicted in the film as the origin of the interpellation of all these figures, as is Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs. For this reason, focusing on the three male protagonists of Pulp Fiction easily allows us to see what differentiates Jules and Butch from Vincent: the first two openly reject Wallace’s mastery over them, deciding to negate his power to give them an identity. In both cases, the end of their narrative arc coincides with the dissolution of their previous identity rather than in the affirmation of a new one. Jules’s dialogue with Vincent in the final scene is clear about this point. On the one hand, Jules declares he will abandon his profession to adopt a nomadic lifestyle modelled after the

144

F. PAGELLO

protagonist of the TV series Kung Fu; on the other hand, Vincent reacts by pointing out that this kind of life is simply that of a ‘bum.’ What this exchange humorously alludes to is precisely that the characters share the common experience of being defined by a certain social network that configures their subjectivity, and that Jules’s decision is going to deactivate this very process. The same is true for Butch, whose whole plot revolves around his successful attempt to escape from the same situation, in which he feels he is trapped against his will. As these examples show, the issue of subjectivity in Tarantino’s films is, in purely dialectical fashion, always presented as concerning the whole cast of characters and not a single figure. The representation of the subject’s ‘essence’ does indeed appear not through the expression of the psychological interiority of one or more individuals juxtaposed to each other. Quite to the contrary, the (re)presentation of how subjectivity is produced consists in the careful construction of the external relationship among individuals who are powerfully linked to one another, particularly with another that can become her Master. As I will make clearer in the following discussions of Jackie Brown and Django Unchained, the emergence of an independent subjectivity is thus presented through a series of reversals of the protagonists’ relationship to their Other, which participates directly in the definition of these figures. To analyse subjectivity in Tarantino’s cinema from a dialectical perspective thus highlights that the multiplication of characters and stories, apparently the expression of the alleged dissolution of social bonds and the domination of postmodern individualism, is instead matched with a focus on collective interdependence among subjects. As a result, instead of looking at the single characters as if they are (un)realistic portraits of atomised, ‘perverse’ individuals, every figure in Tarantino’s films is probably best understood as a representation of the effect of the different power networks in which she is entangled and of subjectivity’s ability to undermine those networks of power from within.

2

Subjectivity and Negativity in Jackie Brown

When Jackie Brown was released, Tarantino’s name had already become almost a synonym for postmodern cinema. It is in this context that the writer-director has been attacked or celebrated for his treatment of controversial issues such as the representation of race, gender and violence (Willis 1993; hooks 1996). For instance, the sexuality of his characters,

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

145

or even the lack of any direct reference to sexuality, was one of the topics of debate, as scholars like Polan did not hesitate to judge this aspect of Tarantino’s cinema as the symptom of the director’s—and, more broadly, of postmodernist culture’s—‘childish’ attitude towards these issues (Polan 2000: 45–57).32 For Polan, this is proven by the fact that in all of his films most characters end up either dead—in the most tragic or ridiculous circumstances (the massacre that closes Reservoir Dogs , Vincent’s death in Pulp Fiction)—or land in ironic or unbelievable happy endings (Jules’s redemption, Butch’s escape). In sum, Tarantino is charged with a lack of ‘seriousness’ in relation to the stories he stages: either too cynically desperate or too ironically naïf, his characters can only be seen as ‘comic book’ figures embodying a superficial, commodified, ‘perverse’ postmodern culture. Jackie Brown appears as an explicit response to this kind of reaction. The very issues at stake in such critical discourse on Tarantino’s work are made obvious through the film’s characters and their stories, as they deal more obviously (and less ironically) with questions of race (through the figures of Jackie, Ordell and his white and black subordinates), gender (Jackie, Ordell, Max, Melanie) and the fetishisation of violence (Ordell). The style of film shows some explicit changes from the previous works of the director, tuning down some of their most playful and reflexive motifs, visibly slowing the rhythm of the narrative and focusing on the intense but (in most cases) less sensational performances by its actors and actress. The theoretical ambition of the work and its value as a self-commentary on Tarantino’s oeuvre and style are therefore apparent. In fact, this is the first of his films to express a clear dialectical movement across his filmography. As already said in the Introduction, from Jackie Brown onwards, each new film explicitly seems to confirm, develop, or contrasts against the previous one(s)33 ; moreover, Jackie Brown initiates this reflexivity not only as a result of the internal logic of Tarantino’s obsessive (‘perverse’) cinephilia, and his personal experiences, but also as a response to feedback coming from the audience and the critics. This engagement with the reception of his films arguably affects all of the threads that compose Jackie Brown, from its narrative structure to the use of the soundtrack. In what follows, however, I will focus exclusively on the construction of the characters in order to relate the critical debates about Tarantino to Žižek’s notion of subjectivity and postmodern theory. While Tarantino’s first three films expose the features decried or praised by his critics on this particular aspect, Jackie Brown

146

F. PAGELLO

displays a greater detachment from such material and an emphasis on a different kind of characters. Some of Jackie Brown’ s characters are still portrayed as the embodiment of postmodern ‘perverse’ subjectivity that Tarantino detractors had identified in his previous films: that is certainly true for Ordell, Louis, Melanie—and possibly for Ray, Mark and Beaumont. Yet, the film juxtaposes this set of characters with two figures that are distinctly different: Jackie Brown and Max Cherry, two middle-aged, working individuals whose lives and personalities are far removed from the over-the-top, cinematic criminals that constitute all of Tarantino’s fictional cast up to this point.34 In Ordell’s portrayal, it is possible to grasp Tarantino’s conceptualisation of the postmodern ‘perverse’ subject, and Tarantino’s incarnation of that subject can be better understood through Žižek’s work.35 Like Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, Ordell is completely immersed in a world of commodities filled with the fetishisation and sexualisation of violence, resulting in a setting of brutal gender oppression. In the very first scene of the movie after the film’s credit, Ordell shows and explains to Louis a video of a group of girls firing automatic, military-grade weapons, immediately associating his (allegedly) cool look with the enjoyment of language and with the combination of sexuality and violence. In what follows—the encounter with Max Cherry and the execution of one of his men, Beaumont—Ordell is described via a series of highly performative speech acts, which he believes exercise control over his surroundings. His apparent mastery of language is indeed what he seems to enjoy the most, as he revels in monologuing about his business plans in the gun trade and his various mistresses. Also in this sense, Ordell embodies the postmodern ‘perverse’ subject, which believes to be able to affirm his absolute freedom by transgressing the Law and which, on the contrary, cannot escape the dialectical relationship to the Other(s) that deeply affects his subjectivity. In fact, Ordell only appears to be in control of the social networks that centre on him. His mastery is more appearance than reality: the truth is that he is clearly still a small fish in a much bigger criminal world (Gallafent 2006: 29). If this relative lack of power holds true for the one who seems to rule the game, it is even truer for all of the figures in Ordell’s network. As soon as the police start investigating his activities, all of the characters depending on him start falling: first Beaumont, then Melanie, Louis and, finally, Ordell himself. The postmodern ‘perverse’ subject is thus unable to support the proliferation of alternative identifications (or dis-identifications): the one who had appeared to be

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

147

at the centre of a system of power is revealed to be a weak node of a much larger hierarchy. It is in this context, of course, that the relationship between Ordell and Jackie Brown takes shape, since Jackie is one of the ‘employees’ of Ordell. The point is that, of course, Jackie Brown is the only character who does not go down with Ordell. In fact, she is the one who takes him down, and this shows why the film can be read as a representation of the master–slave dialectic. As in Hegel’s ‘narrative,’ in fact, the two figures are opposed to each other in a mortal struggle for their freedom. Initially, the slave voluntarily surrenders to the master, who has threatened her life and obtained her obedience. The slave thus agrees to work for the master in exchange for her life. But, through her work, the slave gradually becomes conscious of being the actual producer of the master’s life, and the relationship becomes one of conflict again, with the slave demanding her mastery over her own body. If the slave decides to break the relationship, however, one of the two contenders will have to die (metaforically or, as in the film, literally). In Jackie Brown this conflict is already foreshadowed in the first part of the film even before Jackie starts participating in the main narrative. This section shows us Ordell’s power over his ‘employees’ as he executes Beaumont, who had become a threat to him. Soon after, Ordell makes an attempt on Jackie’s life. As she deflects this attack, she is able to reinstate the pact that sustains their alliance: she will continue to serve her master, and she will suspend his threat to kill her. The unfolding of the film, however, shows how the result of their dialectical struggle is not a situation of peace but instead another, more radical, rupture. Through Jackie Brown’s ability to oppose Ordell’s mastery over her, subjectivity is portrayed as a force of negation, as well as emancipation. The ‘affirmative’ power of subjectivity is its breaking of the oppressive consensus that, on the contrary, supports the affirmation of ‘perverse’ postmodern subjectivity. The importance of negativity is highlighted in the conclusion of the film. In fact, Jackie Brown ends with the protagonist becoming a murderer, although in self-defence, and this act helps scare away her recently found lover. The final long take of Pam Grier’s melancholic close-up further underlines how the end of the story is far from representing a conciliatory and consoling fantasy. The culmination of the subject’s action is an act of self-negation: dialectics, therefore, does not consist in affirmation of a self-transparent subject nor in a final conciliation of opposing sides, but in the emergence of a subject that is in conflict with itself and others.

148

F. PAGELLO

Jackie rejects two interpellations at the same time—Ordell’s and the police’s—and she makes both systems implode by apparently accomplishing what they were actually designed to achieve. These two networks of relationships had in fact something in common—Jackie—and this is what, at the end of the film, goes out of place. When Ordell dies, Jackie loses her master, whereas the police lose their slave. Therefore, two masters—Ordell, the cops—lose their slave: in one move, Jackie liberates herself and suppresses the network of oppression that was also imposed on others. Here again one act of negation generates not a new order but rather a new negativity, which is embodied by the physical and symbolic removal of Jackie’s masters. As a result, the film seems to illustrate how the postmodern perverse subject, embodied by Ordell and the network of characters around him, is deactivated by Jackie’s acts, which are the expression of a rather different kind of subjectivity. The dialectical relationship between the two, moreover, shows that Tarantino’s work does not embrace the idea that postmodern culture could dispense with thinking about the role of such dynamic in social relationships. Tarantino’s theoretical reflection on subjectivity is not limited to its thematic treatment, as Jackie Brown plays with the audience’s point of view, alternating between an impersonal gaze and an alignment of the viewer’s perspective with that of Max Cherry, Jackie’s partner and love interest interpreted by Robert Foster.36 This alternation is evident throughout the film, from the first meeting between Max and Ordell to the intense encounter between him and Jackie, from the crucial scene of the money exchange to the final (?) goodbye between the two lovers. As Botting and Wilson point out, the film is indeed obsessively focused on acts of looking, and in several pivotal scenes Max is found at the centre of a maze of looks (Botting and Wilson 2001: 175–178). In this sense, the film highlights its own form as a montage of different points of view. Moreover, it shows that Max’s particular connection to the drama reflects the special kind of relationship that the film invites the viewer to establish with its fictional world. His attraction for Jackie and active involvement in her plan mimics the audience’s support for the heroine, while the distance that remains between the two characters until the end alludes to the separation between reality and fantasy. This play with the point of view reinforces on the stylistic level how Jackie Brown addresses the issue of subjectivity in postmodern culture, showing that the proliferation of perspectives does not lead to a uniform and continuous space but establishes a precise net of relationships emphasising the fundamental negativity

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

149

generated by the distance between the subject who looks and the object (and, especially, the other subject) which is looked at. Nowhere is this clearer in the whole of Tarantino’s cinema, perhaps, than in the section of the money exchange in Jackie Brown.37 The long sequence brings together the different threads that have been discussed so far, as the repetition of the same scene from three different points of view articulates the composite nature of ‘reality’ as the clash of different subjective positions. The effect thus bears a resemblance to that created by Lynch’s use of multiple voice-overs in Dune, briefly discussed by Žižek in The Ticklish Subject (Žižek 1999: 77–78). These three variations show how Jackie responds first to the interpellations by the police (the scene as we see it the first time), then to Ordell’s (the repetition of the scene from Louis and Melanie’s point of view) and, finally, to Max. The three variations can thus be seen as the embodiment of the labour of the negative; the emergence of the slave’s subjectivity takes down the two masters’ narratives, before leaving the viewer, as Max, to realise that this process is one of self-negation. The first time we see scene as it is staged for the cops, for whom Jackie Brown is performing the role of ‘the forty-four-year-old black woman desperately clinging onto this one shitty little job’—as they significantly call her during the first interrogation at the police station. Jackie is indeed acting as if she were a victim, afraid of losing her job, going to jail or being killed by Ordell. Interestingly enough, this performance almost repeats what we had seen in the iconic opening scene of the film, proving that what seemed to be Jackie’s ‘real’ subjectivity was nothing but the façade the Other had created for her. As a result, it is clear that through this performance she is actually negating this ‘reality.’ While the replacement of her working suit for a new professional dress at the end of the scene is an obvious sign of this process of abandonment of her previous identity, there is no certainty about exactly what the ‘new’ Jackie could be. The second time the scene is seen from the perspective of Louis and Melanie (that is, as it is staged by Jackie for Ordell’s ‘eyes’). Here Jackie appears again as the obedient follower of the plan about which she ‘agreed’ with Ordell, playing the part of a smart employee who is able to offer her master a way out of his predicament. Once again, the character is thwarting expectations, so she is also negating the role that she has adopted in order to appear compliant with Ordell’s wishes. The third and last time we see the same scene is from Max’s point of view—which, as we said, also stands in for the audience’s point of view. Here, Jackie

150

F. PAGELLO

does not perform any specific identity, as she acts via her subtraction: she literally disappears from the stage, which was clearly only created by—and for—her two masters. Her partner Max can only watch and do as she had instructed him to do. The scene thus shows also visually how the ‘final’ Jackie, the one that emerges from this process, does not represent the affirmation of a positive ‘identity’ (for example, a ‘successful forty-fouryear-old age career woman,’ which would be opposed to initial ‘negative’ situation) but rather, first and foremost, the negation of all interpellations addressed to her. In addition to the focus on Max’s point of view and to the fragmentation of this scene, other stylistic choices highlight this ‘third’ Jackie. In particular, the continuous use of extended close-ups throughout the film stresses Jackie Brown’s focus on the dialectical nature of subjectivity in a way that explicitly denies the alleged bidimensionality of Tarantino’s characters. Exceeding the usual adoption of this device, the close-ups in Jackie Brown are indeed the quintessential stylistic feature of Tarantino’s third movie and stand out as a unique feature in his whole filmography. This collection of long, still portraits of the characters, and especially of the aging actors interpreting Jackie, Max and Louis (Robert De Niro), is striking insofar as they draw (on) the power of subjectivity as negativity, cutting the appearance of a pacified representation. The aforementioned long take on Pam Grier’s face that closes the film stresses how the persistence of the traumatic nature of subjectivity, rather than its simple virtual dissolution in postmodern culture, is at the very core of Tarantino’s work. It is for this reason, perhaps, that, after Jackie Brown, Tarantino would start exploring more consciously the issue of gender identities and sexual difference. Žižek, moving from Hegel to Lacan, describes sexual difference through the famous Lacanian aphorism: ‘there is no sexual relationship.’ The ending of the film, and the unresolved love story, highlights a melancholic approach to the relationship between the sexes, which reinforces but also reassesses the representation of gender in his previous work. Before following Tarantino’s foray into this path with Kill Bill and Death Proof in the next chapter, however, I will look at Django Unchained, which, on the contrary, includes what seems to be the closest approximation of a happy ending in Tarantino’s whole filmography and is also the clearest representation of the emergence of subjectivity as a dialectical process.

4

3

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

151

Master–Slave Dialectics in Django Unchained

The most obvious feature of Django Unchained—which follows the linearisation of Tarantino’s storytelling in Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds —is the embracing of a more traditional form of narrative. This formal choice, of course, has some important consequences on the narrative subject matter. For instance, the film’s explicit mention of the myth of Siegfried is consistently linked to the subjectivation of the protagonist as a new kind of epic hero. The film thus mixes pre- and post-modern references to tell the ‘origin story’ of a ‘black superhero’ (as Tarantino himself has admitted, see Peary 2013: 189, 191; see also Coetzee 2016). That the theme of the film is the emergence of the main character’s subjectivity is obvious from its very title. Together with Jackie Brown, Django Unchained is indeed one of the two films in Tarantino’s work that are named after their protagonists, and the very act of (re)naming the character is a topic of the narrative. In the film, in fact, the act of calling someone by his name is not a simple issue. As shown in the very first sequences of the film, Dr. Schultz’s (Christoph Waltz’s) successful business as a bounty hunter revolves around his ability to manipulate people by using language (the English language, the legal language, the German language, the slave traders’ language). In the particular case of Django (Jamie Foxx), for instance, he acquires him through a very specific legal transaction, in which the name of the slave is literally passed from the seller to the buyer through an act of writing. In the following scenes, Schultz invites Django to become his partner, identifies him with the mythic hero Siegfried, and then gives him a new name: Django ‘Freeman.’ This latter highlights the emergence of Django’s subjectivity as a process of negation, as his surname now stresses how he has just been liberated from a state of oppression. While Django completes this process of subjectivation, moreover, Schultz adds something more in the name he gives the protagonist: the promise of a full emancipation—if not, indeed, of love and happiness— which the ending of the film seems to confirm. Is thus Django Unchained a consolatory fantasy of reunification and wholeness, a simple reversal of Tarantino’s alleged postmodern cynicism or playful irony? Not really. The word ‘unchained,’ immediately following the positive naming of the subject in the title, indicates a rather relevant aspect of the story, its development and denouement. The adjective indicates how this process of interpellation is linked to an act of undoing some previous identity, so that in the same moment in which the new identity is named as if it were

152

F. PAGELLO

a ‘whole,’ something is actually detached from it. The new positive entity is thus defined by certain negativity that it excludes but that, nevertheless, makes it appear. The very narrative of Django Unchained, in fact, consists of a series of successive subjectivations of the main character, each of which explicitly negates and then replaces that which precedes it. The story thus draws a dialectical spiral, in which every interpellation is followed by a negation, then another interpellation and so on. As already mentioned, the narrative begins with Schultz’s acquisition of Django as a slave, which he immediately turns into a contract with the prospect of making Django a free man. Subsequently, Schultz makes Django a professional bounty hunter as well as his ‘Siegfried.’ Finally, he creates for Django the ominous character of the slave trader, in order to engage in a last transaction and thus liberate (the mythical figure of) Broomhilda. This set of identities provides Django with the same education in the mastery of language and the performance of professionalism which other characters in Tarantino’s films—since Reservoir Dogs —have confronted. More than in any other work, however, this sequence of interpellations acquires an obvious exemplary meaning. To some extent, it could be argued that this film is the only one in the filmography of the writer-director in which a certain Brechtian flavour (via Godard and De Palma) could be detected in the didactic approach to the screenplay.38 As a matter of fact, Schultz is explicitly presented as Django’s teacher. So the motif of the film is the main character’s education and his rise from a state of minority to the status of an autonomous subject. The Enlightenment, Kantian flavour of such a programme is not at all coincidental. Schultz’s figure belongs to Old (and New) Europe, shaken by the 1789, 1830 and 1848 revolutions (Speck 2014). The German teacher brings to the United States that spirit of emancipation that is going to contribute to the impending Civil War, and his relationship with Django revolves around his imparting lessons in a variety of ‘disciplines,’ including Law, (slave) trading, linguistics and literature, acting and fashion. Both classical and (post)modern, this fairy-tale-like (albeit brutal) Bildungsroman is also an overtly self-reflexive representation of the birth of a character as a social and linguistic subject. In this sense, that Brechtian flavour suits the constructionist approach with which Django Unchained presents an assemblage of social identities and hierarchies that are the product of a constant play of signs and the results of a strict regulation of the individuals’ behaviour.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

153

While in this sense Schultz embodies the didactic, quasi-modernist, aspect of the film, the character is more complex. From the very first sequences, the film shows Schultz simultaneously as a cynical postmodern subject, who treats the Law as just another linguistic game, and as a romantic individual, embracing old German legends and refusing to accept the way of life of the American South. Over the course of the film, therefore, Schulz displays both an economic opportunism and a European sense of superiority towards the American social system, which will finally lead him to his death. What is crucial for my discourse is that this complexity of Schultz’s character is linked to the development of the dialectical relationship between Django and him. Immediately after meeting the slave owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio), the reversal of the relation between Django and Schultz becomes apparent. During the ride towards Candieland, Schultz is worried that Django is pushing his overt provocations of Candie too far. ‘Stop antagonising him’ is the crucial sentence with which Schultz tries to prevent Django from entering in a new dialectical relationship with Candie. Django’s reply indicates the distance between him and Schultz. By answering ‘I am not antagonising him: I am intriguing him’—perhaps the most important sentence in the whole film, and certainly the most dialectical one—Django highlights that a new relationship has been established. The way in which Schultz and Diango enter different ‘agonistic’ relationships with Candie breaks the connection between the two characters who were the exclusive protagonists in the first part of the film and leaves room for the redoubling of their couple in the second part. Once we get to Candieland, Tarantino multiplies the theme of the master–slave dialectics two more times. While awaiting his master in front of the door, Candie’s slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) immediately and explicitly identifies Django as a threat to himself: the relationship between Stephen and Candie informs the very structure of the plantation, the space in which subjects (including Django’s wife, that is, the protagonist’s object of desire and, thus, his own subjectivity) are inscribed in the symbolic order and intersubjective network of slavery. The second part of the film is entirely based on the redoubling of conflicts that oppose these four figures. Of all these characters, that the only one surviving in the end is Django clearly indicates the radical negativity he embodies in the development of such oppositions: this development coincides with the destruction of three out of four members of this network, and what this

154

F. PAGELLO

subject brings forth is not so much a new structure but rather the ruin of the previous one. The first step of this process is the change in the relationship between Django and Schultz as a result of their different attitudes towards Candie. In purely dialectical fashion, here Django simultaneously fulfils the role that Schultz has offered him to play—the slave trader—and at the same time proves to be more skilled than his teacher at understanding how to master the thin line between fiction and reality, between the ability to perform an identity and the actual subjective attachment that sustains it. Things, however, are even more contradictory. On the one hand, the lesson that Schultz tries to give Django is not to get personally involved in the fictional/professional roles that they are staging, so as to avoid experiencing any actual conflict with the other subjects encountered through this business. The commercial exchange Schultz has in mind is the modern, i.e. capitalist, kind of social relationship, entirely mediated by economic language and logic, in which the only connection between subjects is abstractly defined by monetary exchange. On the other hand, however, the relationship between Schultz, Django and Candie cannot be reduced exclusively to this abstract transaction. Even before realising that his guests are not who they say they are, Candie’s suspicious behaviour establishes an agonistic relationship with them, identifying Django and Schultz with something different than just buyers. As the film shows, Schultz’s reproach to Django falls short, and his strategy eventually fails. In two crucial scenes—when Candie lets a fugitive slave be eaten by his dogs and when he asks Schultz to shake his hands— the symbolic consequences of the relationship between the characters are played out. The German proves unable to confine his involvement to a purely monetary level, as Candie refuses the money Schultz offers to ransom the fugitive’s life. Then, when Candie demands a signature to validate the monetary transaction, Schultz’s willed distance from the situation collapses. Once again, we witness the self-destructive behaviour that we have already encountered in Reservoir Dogs . In both scenes, Schultz breaks his own rule, first by trying to stop the slaughter and then by shooting Candie. As the character’s words explicitly point out in this last case, his reactions are not a fully voluntary decision: ‘I couldn’t help it’ are Schultz’s last words, a most Freudian admission that, as a subject, he is not in control of his (re)actions and that the dialectical relationship to the Other expresses itself most radically when this latter is met by an obstinate and obtuse refusal.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

155

Django’s situation is rather different. Already interpellated several times by Schultz, Django is redefined once again by Candie as ‘that nigger in ten thousand.’ Whereas Schultz reacts by affirming his refusal to adhere to Candie’s interpellation, Django on the contrary embraces this injunction to its last consequences. This leads to the victory over Candie, as in the climax of the film Django wears Candie’s clothes just before exploding his mansion, proving that the process of identifying completely with what the Other has requested from him leads indeed to another dialectical act of negation: that of obliterating the Other’s control. This is also the reason why Django’s ultimate obstacle has to be Stephen, who had previously revealed—as expected, given the dialectical relationship with his master—his role as the real ‘Lord’ of Candieland. The dialectical relationship between Stephen and Candie is of course the simplest type of master–slave dialectics in the film, the static kind of relationship in which the (im)balance between the two poles is maintained. The relationships between Schultz and Django and between Django and Candie, on the contrary, point to a different type of dialectics in which no balance is reached and in which subjectivity is rooted in a negativity that ultimately leads to the breaking of the established order. Because Django Unchained offers this complex allegory for the emergence of subjectivity, its criticism as a mere revenge fantasy is misplaced (McGowan 2015: 52). The ‘fantastic’ finale of the film, Django’s killing of Stephen, is accompanied by the clear statement that this act of revenge is precisely that: a fantasy, which would accomplish the character’s revenge but could not result in the creation of any alternative reality— not even for the individual who gets what he wanted.39 The story (the myth) of Django’s subjectivation, that is, cannot be seen as a naive celebration of this fantasy: quite to the contrary, the film displays its purely negative potential in front of the viewer. Both visually and verbally, the final dialogue between Django and Stephen confirms that ‘that nigger in ten thousand’ is not destined to live long, and that his action is a purely destructive one.40 The way that Django crosses barriers, modifying his subjectivity as a platform to adopt different identities, shows how interpellation really works: only by the (un)conscious submission of the subject, as in the case of Stephen, can there be a real identification with the place assigned by the master; and, even in such cases, interpellation inevitably fails to completely capture the subject, allowing for acts of resistance, which have their value even if they are destined to fail as long as they remain purely individualistic enterprises.

156

F. PAGELLO

It is useful to state here that the process of appropriating the Other’s identity in order to explode it from within (e.g. the image of Django, wearing Candie’s clothes, walking out of the burning house) is not only a motif in the film: it is also what the film itself does to the genres with which it works. In fact, Django Unchained’s approach to the Western genre repeats and clarifies the way in which Tarantino had manipulated the crime genre in films such as Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. He appropriates the style and imagery of blaxploitation and applies it to three historically white genres: the gangster film, the neo-noir and the Western.41 This is confirmed by Adilifu Nama’s argument, strongly approved by Roche, that Django can be fruitfully read as a Southern Gothic, rather than a Western (Nama 2015: 106–120, Roche 2018: 39–40). The final explosion of the house, the gory violence of the finale, as well as the pure negativity embodied by Django—who ends up becoming the master of the old, decaying mansion—are indeed all references to the imagery of the Gothic. The American Southern Gothic, as Leslie Fiedler’s reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories shows, cannot but be linked to the horror of slavery (Fiedler 1960: 378). By appropriating the blaxploitation genre to reread the (Spaghetti) Western, the film does perform therefore the same destructive action that its narrative and formal levels pursue. When the oppressed subject, Django, enters a dialectical relationship with his masters and with other oppressed members of the community, as black filmmakers did by reworking Hollywood genres in the 1970s, the master’s subjectivity can be negated by the subject’s ability to appropriate it and then question it from within. Carrying on the same operation within the Western genre, Tarantino proves that this dialectical process is at the core of his work, in the way he writes his characters and in the thematic and visual motifs of all the genres he chooses to appropriate and reactivate.

Notes 1. The close-up is described in the screenplay as follows: ‘the woman on the floor has just taken a sever spaghetti-western-style gang beating. Her face is bloody, beaten up, and torn. The high contrast B/W turning the red blood into black blood.’ While (interestingly enough, since all of his other screenplays have appeared in print) Tarantino has purposefully decided not

4

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

157

to publish the Kill Bill screenplay, the original text has widely circulated on the Internet (Tarantino 2003). The screenplays describe what we see as follows: ‘A hand belonging to the off-screen Man’s (…) begins tenderly wiping away the blood from the young woman’s face. Little by little as the Male Voice speaks, the beautiful face underneath is revealed to the audience. But what can’t be wiped away, is the white hot hate that shines in both eyes at the man who stands over her’ (Tarantino 2003). It is thus already clear that with Kill Bill Tarantino intends to introduce in his cinema an explicit reflection on the work of feminist Film Studies and, particularly, on the reassessment of Mulvey’s theoretical approach in Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws (2015). This interest will become obvious in his following film, Death Proof, in which the dialectics between sadism and masochism, taken from the slasher movies studied by Clover, is the very subject of the narrative. This theme will be at the centre of the next, and final, chapter of this book. It is interesting to notice that in the screenplay Tarantino describes the second shot in an entirely different way, from a narrative as well as thematic point of view: instead of the close-up of Bill’s booth, the camera would have shown the complete scene around the Bride, revealing the dimensions of the massacre as well as the composition of the murdering team. In addition to completely changing the timing of revelation that is only gradually exposed in the film, this simple modification in the point of view would have shifted the focus away from the relationship between Bill and the Bride, which becomes the exclusively centre of the scene as it stands in the film. On the inherent link between dialectic thinking and representation see Jameson (2010, 2011). The Fright of Real Tears (2001) is the only book by Žižek explicitly devoted to the cinema. For a review of the hostile commenters of Žižek’s work about film, see McGowan (2016). In the field of Film Studies, the most prominent and, according to McGowan, ‘the fiercest’ of his critics is David Bordwell (see Bordwell 2005). Despite this resistance, a group of scholars have developed Žižek’s Lacanian approach work in the field of Film studies (see, for example, McGowan 2007, 2011, 2012, 2015; McGowan and Kunkle 2004; Vighi 2009, 2014; Flisfeder 2012; Flisfeder and Willis 2014; Bianchi 2017). For another favourable, brief introduction to Žižek’s theory of film, see Simmons (2009). Quite surprisingly, I am not aware of any intervention made by Žižek about Tarantino’s cinema in his books, except for a single reference to Kill Bill in a footnote in The Parallax View (2004: 411). It is also very interesting to notice that McGowan more than once indicated Tarantino’s as an example of postmodern ideology (see

158

F. PAGELLO

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

infra, pp. 108–110). For one of the rare analyses of Tarantino’s cinema adopting a thoroughly Žižekian approach see Black (2019). This chapter will take therefore a slightly different direction than the main appropriations of Žižek’s approach in Film Studies. As discussed in Note 7, Todd McGowan has particularly contributed with a vast amount of publications to the attempt to introduce Žižek’s version of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the field of Film Studies, while Fabio Vighi, Heiko Feldner and Matthew Flisfeder have developed Žižek’s contribution to a renewal of ideology critique for the study of cinema and the media. While also building on their work, this chapter looks at the something more simple, which contributes to the very possibility of analysing of cinema from this theoretical perspective: the idea that the representation of characters and characters’ relations in film can be read as a reflection on the dialectical nature of subjectivity, and thus support a critical take on postmodernism theory. The debate between Žižek and Bordwell and its relevance for Film Studies is discussed in Flisfeder’s 2011 article ‘Between Theory and Post-Theory; Or, Slavoj Žižek in Film Studies and Out.’ In the pages referred to above, Žižek contest Carroll’s use of the term ‘dialectics’ in relation to ‘Post-Theory’ (and in opposition to ‘Theory’): for Žižek, his definition falls short as it identifies Popper’s notion of scientific development as the ultimate example of dialectics while, of course, explicitly rejects the Hegelian (and Marxist) conception of this notion. It is easy, as it was the case for Rancière, to notice the simultaneity between Žižek’s philosophical success in the English-speaking world and the release of Tarantino’s early films. On Žižek’s criticism of Foucault in relation to the issue of ideology critiques see Vighi and Feldner (2007a, b). Among the other notable books from this period are Looking Awry (1990), The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), which borrows its title from The Matrix and fully develops the very postmodern (and ‘very Nineties’) theme of cyberspace, the alleged dissolution of the subject, etc. Some Film Studies scholars have insisted on Baudrillard’s—and sometimes (as in the case Constable) on Jameson’s alleged—nihilism (Constable 2014, 2015: 39–74). While in the case of Jameson this interpretation is highly questionable (see infra, pp. 79–83), this reading is certainly main one of the reasons why Tarantino’s cinema has been seen, both positively and critically, as nihilist and, therefore, as the symptom of the dissolution of dialectical thinking. On the legitimacy of Žižek’s reading of Hegel see Pippin (2012–2013); for an application of Pippin’s alternative reading of Hegel to one of

4

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

159

Žižek’s favourite subjects, see his book on Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Pippin 2017). Žižek’s Les plus sublime des hystériques: Hegel avec Lacan (1988) already elaborated on the Lacanian reading of Hegel through the notion of ‘hysteria.’ See Žižek’s ‘Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a View of Alien’ (2007), but also his discussion of the film in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. See in particular his discussion of Vertigo and Psycho, two films that also important in the work of other relevant scholars in this context such as Linda Williams and must be seen as turning points between modern and postmodern cinema. As argued infra (p. 59), the apparent disinterest that Tarantino shows for Hitchcock’s cinema can be ‘explained’ through his focus on De Palma’s work; as a consequence, what Žižek writes about Hitchcock could easily be mobilised to analyse also Tarantino’s cinema, as the migration of themes and figures from Hitchcock to De Palma, and from this to Tarantino is easily identifiable. Pippin (2017). See, for instance, his discussion of Lost Highway (Žižek 2000). Both of Žižek’s films (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology) use this theme as a guiding thread for their discourse. At the very beginning of his international career, i.e. in the Introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek traces his distance from some current in Marxism, and even Althusser himself, precisely for not having accepted that ideology would not disappear in a society without classes (Žižek 1989). This is the theme of the first chapter of The Ticklish Subject (Žižek 1999). This theme is addressed in almost all of Žižek’s books, but a sustained discussion of the role of fantasies in 1990s postmodern culture might be found perhaps in The Plague of Fantasies (1999), and Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), which takes its title from The Matrix (Wachowski Bros, 1999). This difficulty with ‘identification’ does not mean that the viewers’ are not aligned with the protagonist(s) of the narrative. Nevertheless, the audience is often asked to reconsider what film theorist Murray Smith (1995) has called allegiance: while still encouraged to root for the main characters, in fact, the spectators of Tarantino’s film are always invited to keep some distance from them from a moral perspective. To understand more clearly the cause of this supposed ‘paradox’ one has to adopt the postmodernist perspective that identifies in the film a nihilistic representation of subjectivity, leading to the dissolution of the characters through a purely self-destructive process. Nevertheless, by taking such a stance, a contradiction remains and becomes obvious: while Reservoir Dogs was seen as a sombre expression of contemporary culture,

160

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

F. PAGELLO

Pulp Fiction would embody, on the contrary, a much lighter and fundamentally ironic perspective. As it is to be expected, this contradiction starts actually making perfect sense if one takes a dialectical approach. I use this term to link Reservoir Dogs to Tarantino’s most ‘Brechtian’ work, Django Unchained, at the core of the last section of this chapter. It is possible to argue that the two films share a similar ‘pedagogical’ approach precisely because they focus on certain aspects of subjectivity more clearly than other Tarantino’s films. In the diegesis, the cause of the catastrophic ending of the film could also be located in Mr. Blonde’s killing spree during the robbery. This element does not contradict but actually reinforces my argument. Blonde’s behaviour, in fact, is the ultimate non-professional act in the film and, for this reason, the ultimate cause of the specific way in which the events unfold. For a discussion of why Tarantino refused to call these sequences ‘flashbacks’ and, more in general, the role of such sequences in his cinema see Roche (2018: 149–155). In a very interesting conversation with Robert Zemeckis, Tarantino himself argued that, as video-store clerk, he would have placed the film in the ‘comedy’ section (Willman 1995). As it is to be expected, critics and scholars severely questioned the possibility of taking any of these stories ‘seriously’ (Polan 2000: 82–85). On the contrary, other scholars have emphasised the relevance of the theme of the characters’ redemption in Tarantino’s films (e.g. Brooker and Brooker 1996; Davis and Womack 1998). Issues of sexuality and sexual difference are the topic of the following chapter, which discusses Kill Bill and Death Proof . While here I won’t focus on this aspect, it is obvious that the melancholic love story in Jackie Brown (as well as the representation of a sexual act—the only heterosexual sex scene in his whole filmography) are explicit responses to the critical debates about the homosocial and/or stereotypical images of male–female relationship in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In the interviews about Jackie Brown, Tarantino explains how he wanted the movie to appear different with his previous films: ‘I don’t want people to take me for granted (…). I don’t want to do a Woody Allen or a John Sayles thing, where one film blurs intro the next (…). I want people to see my new movie, not my [last] movie. I want each movie to have a life complete unto itself’ (Peary 2013: 117). For an analysis of the two characters, and a telling comparison with Leonard’s novel which it adapts, see Gallafent (2006: 85–98). For a careful analysis of Ordell see Gallafent (2006: 29–37).

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

161

36. Tarantino has explicitly declared: ‘Max is the audience – you see the movie through Max’s eyes. He’s the conscience and the heart of the piece, and he’s definitely the major human link to the film’ (Peary 2013: 114). 37. Interesting analyses of this sequence are also found in Bordwell and Thompson (2008: 280–283) and Roche (2018: 151). 38. It is noteworthy that Tarantino won his second Academy award for an original screenplay with the script for Django Unchained, eighteen years after Pulp Fiction and with the film that immediately followed Inglorious Basterds, which had marked a significant turn in his filmography. Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained could perhaps be seen as the two films that best define two central moments in Tarantino’s career, and both had a remarkable, even if not comparable, impact on their cinematic and cultural context. In fact, Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained are also Tarantino’s biggest box office successes (interestingly, they were also the most unusual and personal films to reach such remarkable success in those two years: in 1994 other titles in the top ten included much more reassuring films such as Forrest Gump, The Flintstones, Dumb and Dumber; in 2012 the highest grossing films were primarily franchises such as Avengers, The Hunger Games, The Hobbit and Twilight ). 39. Paradoxically, it would seem to me that McGowan’s remark about the critical potential of fantasy might serve as an accurate description of what Tarantino’s revenge narratives aim to accomplish: ‘fantasy explains [the] existence [of the symbolic order]. Though this explanation blunts the trauma of the absence, it nonetheless acknowledges it and creates the possibility for an encounter with it […]. As a result, the political valence of fantasy is never decided once […]. Fantasy most often functions ideologically, but it can expose the failure of symbolic authority rather than shoring up that authority’ (McGowan 2015: 52). For a reading of Django Unchained along these lines, see Black (2019). 40. Other critics have made the same point. For instance, in his monograph Roche writes ‘it is not so much the discourse on exceptionalism that can be deplored, since the film ultimately deconstructs it, as Tarantino’s decision to follow the action hero on an individual quest’ (Roche 2018: 51). 41. On Tarantino’s approach to blaxploitation cinema see Nama (2015: 3–6, 105) and Roche (2018: 39).

162

F. PAGELLO

References Bianchi, Pietro. 2017. Lacan and Cinema. London: Karnac Books. Black, Jack. 2019. ‘You Ain’t Gonna Get Away Wit’ This, Django’: Fantasy, Fiction and Subversion in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 36 (7): 611–637. Bordwell, David. 2005. ‘Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything’. David Bordwell’ Website on Cinema, July 2020. Available at: http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/Žiž ek.php. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll (eds.). 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2008. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: MacGraw-Hill. Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. 2001. The Tarantinian Ethics. London: Sage. Brancati, Simona. 2014. Cinema Unchained: The Films of Quentin Tarantino. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Brooker, Keith M. 2007. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praege. Brooker, Peter and Will Brooker. 1996. Pulpmodernism: Tarantino’s Affirmative Action. In Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the Literature Media Divide, eds. Deborah Cartmell et alii. London: Pluto Press. Clover, Carol. 2015 (1992). Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coetzee, Carli. 2016. Django Unchained: A Black-Centered Superhero and Unchained Audiences. Black Camera 7 (2): 62–72. Constable, Catherine. 2014. Fredric Jameson. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman. New York: Routledge. Constable, Catherine. 2015. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. 1998. Shepherding the Weak: The Ethics of Redemption in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Literature/Film Quarterly 26 (1): 60–66. Fiedler, Leslie. 1960. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2011. Between Theory and Post-Theory; Or, Slavoj Žižek in Film Studies and Out. Revue Canadienne D’Études Cinématographiques/Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20 (2): 75–94. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2012. The Symbolic, the Sublime and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Flisfeder, Matthew, and Louis-Paul Willis (eds.). 2014. Žižek and Media: A Reader. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gallafent, Edward. 2006. Quentin Tarantino. London: Routledge.

4

SUBJECTIVITY AND DIALECTICS

163

hooks, bell. 1996. Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction. In Reel to Real: Sex, Race, Class at the Movies. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 2010. The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London and New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2011. Representing Capital: A Commentary of Volume One. London and New York: Verso. Leonard, Elmore. 1992. Rum Punch. New York: Dell. McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McGowan, Todd. 2011. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press. McGowan, Todd. 2012. The Fictional Christopher Nolan. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. McGowan, Todd. 2015. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game. New York and London: Bloomsbury. McGowan, Todd. 2016. Introduction. Žižek and Cinema, special issue, International Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (3): 1–13. McGowan, Todd, and Sheila Kunkle (eds.). 2004. Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: Other Press. Nama, Adilifu. 2015. Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino. Austin: Texas University Press. Peary, Gerald. 2013. Quentin Tarantino Interviews: Revised and Updated. Jackson, MS: Press of Mississippi. Pippin, Robert. 2012–2013. Back to Hegel? Mediations 26 (1–2): 7–28. Pippin, Robert. 2017. The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxiety of Unknowingness. Chicago: Universiy of Chicago Press. Polan, Dana. 2000. Pulp Fiction. London: BFI. Roche, David. 2018. Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Simmons, Laurence. 2009. Slavoj Žižek. In Film, Theory, Philosophy: Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman. London: Acumen. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotions, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Speck, Oliver C. (ed.). 2014. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema. New York: Bloomsbury. Tarantino, Quentin. 2003. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2. Internet Movie Script Database, July 6, 2020. Available at: https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Kill-Bill-Volume1-&-2.html. Vighi, Fabio. 2009. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vighi, Fabio. 2014. Critical Theory and Film: Rethinking Ideology and Film Noir. New York: Continuum.

164

F. PAGELLO

Vighi, Fabio, and Heiko Feldner. 2007a. Žižek: Beyond Foucault. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vighi, Fabio, and Heiko Feldner. 2007b. Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis? Žižek Against Foucault. European Journal of Political Theory 6 (2): 141–159. Vighi, Fabio, and Heiko Feldner. 2010. From Subject to Politics. Subjectivity 3 (1): 31–52. Willis, Sharon. 1993. The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room. Camera Obscura 11 (2[32]): 41–74. Willman, Chris. 1995. Celluloid Heroes. Los Angeles Times Calendar, March 26. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Art of Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie´slowski Between Theory and Post-theory. London: BFI. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. How to Read Lacan. London and New York: W. W. Norton. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London and New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014a. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London, New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014b (1988). The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Cambridge: Polity Press.

CHAPTER 5

Spectatorship, Genre and Violence

Rancière’s focus on a specific conception of the aesthetic experience; Jameson’s insistence on the necessity of a dialectical take on postmodern culture; Žižek’s approach to subjectivity as alternative to standard postmodern readings of Tarantino’s characters and narratives: the previous chapters revolved around the question of how the viewer ‘should’ (or should not) relate to the images, sounds and stories projected on the screen. The last section of this work will finally look even more directly at how Tarantino’s films constantly provoked their viewers and critics to interrogate themselves about how to interpret what they see, hear and empathise with. The question can be addressed in two extremely different, if complementary, ways. On the one hand, there is the problem of representation, which leads to questions such as the following: what kinds of characters and stories are depicted in Tarantino’s films? In which kinds of fictional settings are they placed? What do the film’s stylistic solutions tell us about how Tarantino judges the worlds he has created? From this angle, the question lies, at least primarily, on the side of the object. In this sense the interpretation of the films would coincide with the effort of analysing each work and its fabric in order to identify the many—and most likely contradictory—‘meanings’ that readers can recognise in the ‘text.’ The same questions, however, might be asked from a different perspective: how are the viewers supposed to react? Are they supposed to identify with the characters? How does the film orient the audience in relation © The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7_5

165

166

F. PAGELLO

to what they see? From this angle, the accent is placed on the relationship between the film and its spectatorship, thus looking at the problems from the perspective of the subject. Here the issue is whether the viewer is going to take one or another stance towards what she is seeing, and how the film can attempt to manipulate her response not only in one specific, but in multiple, and contradictory directions. In this particular sense, the audience’s ‘final’ argument about what kind of relationship the film establishes with its viewer cannot be decided only on the basis of the work itself but only through its interaction with a set of (implicit) theoretical moves through which the viewer will choose, consciously or unconsciously, to activate the film’s multiple elements. If she ever decides to do so: many, possibly most of the members of the audience, could indeed decide not to develop any interpretation. Others may take instead that necessary ‘detour through theory’ mentioned at the beginning of this book, and that I have tried to follow throughout this work to make sense of Tarantino’s films. If the spectator stops before making this move, however, then she can certainly experience the films on a purely sensory level and/or enjoy them as ‘pure entertainment.’1 As we have seen, scholars like Polan and Booker have insisted this is the (only) way one can appreciate postmodern films such as Tarantino’s. From this perspective, in fact, this is the way in which one should experience them in order not to be misled in looking for a deeper meaning to be extracted through the process of interpretation, which would only fail if applied to such texts. This chapter intends to make clearer why and how I have taken the opposite perspective. The insistence on the centrality of a certain tension animating all the aspects of Tarantino’s films (Chapter 2) and the consequent conviction about the necessity of adopting a dialectical approach to their reading (Chapters 3 and 4) are based on the assumption that this type of cinema invites the viewer to choose between multiple and, indeed, contradictory ways to interpret these works. That many critics and scholars have resolved that Pulp Fiction’s only raison d’être is found in its ‘coolness’ and extreme aestheticisation—which is to say that the film is ‘ meaningless’ (see infra, p. 10)—has thus to be seen as the consequence of adopting a specific a critical stance, the result of a precise decision based on a certain theoretical paradigm. On the contrary, to affirm that the film supports a more a less precise discourse about ‘redemption’ (see infra, pp. 108–109, 116–117, 160) implies that the film has one or more ‘meanings,’ and this affirmation hints at a completely different point of

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

167

view about contemporary culture, art and politics. Both positions seem valid if one focuses on how the film itself practices, and theorises at the same time, a certain way of involving the viewer in the creation of its meaning—or lack thereof. To situate these issues in relation to debates in film theory about the representation of gender, history and violence, I will first discuss some key ideas presented in the only book of film theory written by an academic that, to my knowledge, Tarantino has cited as a reference in his interviews (Peary 2013: 142): Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, originally appeared in 1992 and reprinted numerous times since. Clover’s work became an extremely influential study and represented a key contribution to the theoretical debate about the cultural and political stakes of popular genres at the height of the postmodern era. What is most interesting here, however, is that Men, Women, and Chain Saws focused precisely on the kind of 1970s and 1980s exploitation film that Tarantino names as the cinema of his formative years. The book’s goal was to respond to those critics and scholars that regarded this kind of cinema, at best, as sensationalist, idiotic entertainment and, at the worst, as reactionary and sadistic male fantasies. For Clover, on the contrary, films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hopper, 1976) or I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) were far less simplistic than the critics seemed to believe (Clover 2015: 22– 39, 114–125, 139–165), and could be seen as extremely symptomatic of important changes in the representation of gender identities. Crucially, Clover’s different reading of those horror films was also, if not primarily, a revision of the psychoanalytic theory that was to be attacked by Bordwell and Carroll in the much-discussed Post-Theory (see infra, pp. 132–134). Questioning the famous analyses by Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz that had shaped ‘apparatus theory,’ Clover posited that narrative cinema was often not dependent on the promotion of the ‘sadistic’ perspective of the male gaze but, instead, could encourage the viewer to adopt a position she described as ‘female masochism,’ which is based on the viewer’s alignment with the victim–heroes of these films (Clover 2015: 206–230). This perspective had multiple advantages. While it denied that (male) sadism was an inevitable effect of a certain technological apparatus, it still acknowledged the importance of examining the role of this element in the horror movie, specifically, and in cinema, more generally. Highlighting the centrality of two contradictory impulses in both the film’s text and the viewer’s experience, moreover, Clover’s

168

F. PAGELLO

approach comes close to the kind of dialectical perspective that I have tried to adopt throughout this book. After an introductory section briefly covering some key aspects of Clover’s theoretical approach, I will then engage with some of these issues in relation to the four films by Tarantino that I haven’t discussed in detail so far: Kill Bill (2003–2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019). These works offer ideal opportunities to address the themes of this chapter, and their examination will also serve as a summary of the discourse developed in the rest of the book. Kill Bill and Death Proof are Tarantino’s first revenge films, which include elements of the slasher movie and are entirely devoted to female protagonists fighting back male (white) aggression: in their form and themes they refer even explicitly to Clover’s book, which focused on the slasher and the rape-revenge film among its case studies. Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, on the other hand, address the issue of the representation of (male) violence in specific and actually existed historical contexts. Breaking with Tarantino’s earlier films’ exclusive focus on purely fictional worlds—while carrying on his reworking of 1970s exploitation cinema—these two recent works comment on the way cinema can or cannot stage history, and reflect on how they give shape to a specific relationship between the viewer and what is represented on the screen.

1

From Clover to Tarantino

Carol Clover wrote Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film between the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, publishing her book in 1992 (interestingly enough, the same year in which Reservoir Dogs was released). The volume explores examples of three sub-genres of American horror cinema mostly emerging from the independent and exploitation scenes (the slasher, the possession film and the rape-revenge story), with the goal of understanding their viewer’s aesthetic, emotional and political experience, especially as concerns gender identities. As anticipated above, Clover’s point of departure addresses one of the key questions in 1970s film theory. The theoretical objective of Men, Women and Chain Saws was to challenge the appropriateness of the notion of ‘male gaze’ developed by apparatus theory and feminist film theory to properly understand the specific kind of involvement and

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

169

pleasures guiding the authors and the audiences of those horror films.2 Echoing Mulvey’s seminal article, critics and scholars looked at the representation of women in the genres studied by Clover as the result of the voyeuristic and sadistic look of the man (e.g. the horror film’s camera and murderous characters) on the body of a woman (Mulvey 1975). Clover reversed the perspective, starting from a simple, empirical observation: while the target audiences of these genres were teenage boys, the majority of the films focused on female protagonists. This led to formulation of her leading hypothesis, that this genre—and, quite likely, other types of cinema—cannot be understood through Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, and that the basic impulse of the viewer does not consist in—or to be more precise, cannot be limited to—the satisfaction of his sadistic fantasies.3 In fact, the horror films she analysed regularly placed the audience in the position of the victim, almost always female, thus prompting its audience, mainly constituted by teenage boys, to experience not only the violent enjoyment of the attacker but also the suffering of the girls under attack. For Clover, the centre of the attention of the film is not so much the stalker/serial killer but rather what she calls the ‘victim-hero(ine),’ whose enduring through the series of pains finally leads her to become the only survival (hence, the famous figure of the ‘final girl,’ central in the sub-genre of the slasher movie: Clover 2015: X–XIII, 35–64). Rather than (only) indulging in his sadistic impulses, the viewer would thus be interested in experiencing what Clover refers to as ‘female masochism,’ which specifically indicates the pleasure enjoyed by a male subject while identifying with the position of a victimised female character. Instead of focusing exclusively on the ‘assaultive gaze’ of the stalker, Clover insists on the passage from this latter to what she calls the ‘reactive gaze,’ which highlights how the experience of the viewer is marked by her alignment with the victims of the violence (Clover 2015: 191– 205). Building on psychoanalytic film theory, Clover argues that in a more precise Lacanian sense, the gaze cannot be attributed to a single, masterful subjectivity: if these films stage a ‘gaze’ in this sense, therefore, it would have the exact opposite meaning of a simplistic affirmation male’s ‘assaulting gaze’ and it would suggest instead that the male sense of control is being questioned, if not dissipated. In a much-quoted sentence which would perfectly describe the narrative at the centre of Death Proof,

170

F. PAGELLO

Clover writes: ‘whenever a man imagines himself as controlling voyeur— imagines, in Lacanian terms, that his ‘look’ at women constitutes a gaze—some sort of humiliation will soon follow’ (Clover 2015: 215). This crucial, two-fold process is highlighted by Clover’s insistence on another feature of the narrative structure of these films. At the beginning, the young audience can cheer the stalker/monster (e.g. Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees), enjoying the revolting, and openly sadistic, ways in which he tortures and kills their youthful avatars on the screen. Both male and female teenage bodies, more or less sexualised, are slaughtered in ‘creative’ fashions on the screen, offering excitement and obvious sexual allegories to the teenage boys (and girls) to whom these films are addressed. This brutal, somehow nonsensical violence (albeit often loosely justified as the expression of, and/or the protest against, some repressive powers-that-be) clearly manifests the audience’s sadistic (as well as rebellious) drives; but since the violence is directed against young characters that are their obvious cinematic representation, the initial alignment with the killer is always inevitably broken in what follows, leading to complete reversal in the final sections of the film. Siding with the victims who start to fight back, the viewer is led to align more and more closely with the (female) ‘victim hero,’ the only surviving character and, therefore, the only possible point of view which could be shared by the spectator. For Clover, therefore, these films construct the instability of the male gaze and encourage a gender shift that finally emphasises a subject position characterised by masochism rather than sadism. Not only because of its direct links with Tarantino’s films, and postmodern cinema modern broadly, the theoretical framework of Men, Women and Chain Saws can support the approach adopted in this book. Like Žižek’s, in fact, Clover’s discourse seemed to respond (in advance) to Bordwell and Carroll’s attacks on 1970s film theory.4 Drawing on the psychoanalytic feminist film theory that was developed in the 1980s as a correction to apparatus theory (Silverman 1988; Modlesky 1988; Williams 1989), she did not reject the fundamental premises of psychoanalysis and helps to revise some of its serious misuses in film theory. The interest in the social identity as well as in the sensory and emotional experience of empirical viewers anticipates some of the critical remarks that are found in Post-Theory, taking as a starting point some sociological and demographic information about the actual audiences of the films and emphasising the specific enjoyment at the centre of popular cinema. At the same time, however, Men, Women and Chain Saws does not dismiss the

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

171

work of Freud or his followers in Film Studies, proposing a theory of the cinematic experience that does not rely primarily on empiricist observations of particular groups of spectators. Offering a convincing alternative to the dismissal of psychoanalysis, Clover’s perspective also displays what can be regarded as a dialectical approach to the problem of interpretation—since it neither removes the work from the material context of its production and reception nor gives excessive privilege to viewers’ individual experiences, as if the collection and analysis of data referring to singular acts of reception could exhaust all that can be said about all of the experiences that an aesthetic work is able to elicit. In this sense, there is no ground for the ‘modest,’ ‘middle-level’ research championed by Bordwell and Carroll, as the goal of film theory is not the development of a more ‘scientific’ method promoting a less ‘subjective’ point of view, as detached as possible from its object of study (see infra, pp. 131– 135). On the contrary, the ambition is precisely to elaborate a theoretical understanding of historical phenomena, which begins with the acknowledgment and analysis of the subjective perspectives of filmmakers, viewers and critics. Clover’s study thus also contributes to the refusal of the ‘posttheoretical’ rejection of psychoanalysis as pseudo-science and supports its possible uses in a dialectical approach to postmodern cinema. As Clover shows, a misreading of Lacan’s notion of the gaze led film theorists to conflate the camera’s, the character’s and the viewer’s point of view with a rather different and more complex concept. In the same period or in the years following the publication of Men, Women and Chain Saws, in fact, scholars such as Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Todd McGowan, Fabio Vighi and others highlighted how the shortcuts and sheer misunderstanding provoked by 1970s apparatus and feminist film theory can be seen as the result of the superimposition between Lacan’s notion of the gaze and Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Copjec 1994; McGowan and Kunkle 2004; Flisfeder 2012; McGowan 2015; Bianchi 2017). From the more consistent psychoanalytical perspective elaborated by these scholars, the voyeuristic and sadistic look at the tortured body of the female victim cannot be seen as the automatic identification of the audience’s perspective with that of the camera or the character that is supposedly the ‘source’ of such vision. As proven by the work of directors such as Hitchcock, De Palma, Cronenberg or Lynch (often quoted in Clover’s book as in the writings of the other scholars mentioned above) cinema can manipulate the viewer’s reactions in more sophisticate ways that are the result

172

F. PAGELLO

of numerous elements which include the film’s narrative structure, the construction of the characters and their relationships, and the multiplication and the convergence of different points of view. The ‘gaze’ here is something much more unstable than in Mulvey’s theory and makes the viewers’ doubt of the characters’ mastery over the fictional world. As McGowan summarised in his revision of Lacanian film theory, from such perspective the whole enjoyment produced by cinema—that is, the very reason why we watch movies—lies indeed in the provocation of a gaze that threatens the viewer’s sense of control (McGowan 2007, 2015: 70– 78). This idea supports Clover’s discourse that the masochistic nature of viewer’s desire moves the audience of the horror film and, most likely, of other kinds of cinema. Clover’ perspective has also the virtue of rejecting the antipsychoanalytical (and, indeed, entirely anti-dialectical) conception of subjectivation as an exclusively oppressive process. In fact, in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, it is precisely in the process of subjectivation that the actual ‘agency’ of the subject is found: the subject’s ‘desire’ and ‘masochism’ are not to be seen simply as the effect of the manipulation operated by disciplinary powers but, quite to the contrary, as the only (dialectical) phenomena through which the subject’s freedom can emergence (Copjec 1994: 16–38). Building on the arguments laid out in relation to Jameson’s and Žižek’s theories, in this chapter I will thus engage with Clover’s work to show how the dismissal of psychoanalysis either in the name of empiricism or on the basis of postmodern, poststructuralist thinking prevents us from fully appreciating how much the interpretation of contemporary culture can still gain from adopting such dialectical perspective. Clover’s engagement with the historicity of the films she is studying has other significant consequences. Given her specific interest in gender, Clover insists on the importance of considering the impact of the Women’s Movement for American culture and society in the 1970s period to an understanding of gender identities as treated in the popular cinema of the time. The relevance of this context is particularly evident in Tarantino’s social and cultural background. The writer-director never met his actual father, and he grew up surrounded by his mother’s flatmates and friends that he described as being all independent women, both white and black. In his interviews, he often discussed the key role played by his mother in his reception and imagination of strong female characters (Peary 2013: 90). The point here is not to identify a

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

173

direct influence of the ideology of the 1960s Women’s movement on the work and even the personality of the writer-director, but to highlight how the constant presence of the popular culture of that era in Tarantino’ films cannot but reflect, in the subtle ways analysed by Clover, the emerging of a new sensibility towards the representation new gender and racial identities. Tarantino was precisely one of those male teenagers who grew up watching the films discuss in Men, Women and Chain Saws, and it is thus not surprising that his declared ambition is to recreate for his audience a set of effects—emotional and aesthetic, graphic and cognitive—comparable to those provoked by exploitation movies on his youthful imagination. The connection between Tarantino and Clover’s book is even more direct. Not only, as mentioned above, has Tarantino declared to have read and have been inspired by it, particularly for Death Proof, which he considers to be his take on the slasher movie (Peary 2013: 142). As discussed in Chapter 4 (pp. 127–129), the very first lines of Kill Bill can be seen as a summary of the driving argument of Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and the movie as a whole (like the following Death Proof ) thoroughly explores the themes of the book. Bill’s statement about his apparent sadism, which, he argues, is actually his masochism, explicitly relates the film to the themes of Clover’s book and offers a reflexive comment on Tarantino’s previous work. In a rather dialectical fashion, Tarantino was responding to the criticism sparked by his earlier films, openly addressing the accusation of creating exploitative portrayals of female (and black) characters in his cinema (Willis 1995; hooks 1996). Of course—but this cannot surprise the reader of Clover’s work nor anyone who shares the enjoyment provoked by a certain type of popular cinema— Tarantino addresses these issues precisely by creating a mix of 1970s exploitation genres. In fact, at their time, these films were attacked on the grounds of the same charges, that is, for their sensationalist violence, obvious sadism, explicit representation of the female body, the involuntary racism or sheer exploitation of racial stereotypes. Films such as Kill Bill , Death Proof or Inglourious Basterds go back to such a specific cinematic tradition, embracing its ‘exploitative’ aesthetics and mixing the genres of the martial arts film, the gory iconography of the horror movie, the motifs of the rape-revenge film, the graphic violence and, indeed, overt sadism of the Spaghetti Western. Also important is that Clover’s book points to the crucial role played by another type of cinema and a group of filmmakers whose names have

174

F. PAGELLO

appeared frequently in this book. As mentioned above, Clover discusses a number of films and auteurs that Tarantino has frequently cited in his interviews as among his favourites, and to whom he has paid homage in several of his films. Clover opens indeed her study by examining De Palma’s 1974 film, Carrie, starting with its reception, referencing statements by Stephen King about his original book, and then describing De Palma’s adaptation. The film’s themes, style and critical reception provide perfect examples of Clover’s argument in Men, Women, and Chain Saws. She shows how both King and De Palma consciously addressed a teenage, male audience that was ready to empathise with a teenage, female character, whose sexual and social repression was both specifically gendered and potentially universal. For Clover, Carrie is therefore a quintessential example of the female masochism that is the driving concept of her whole study. As concerns Tarantino, it useful to notice here how he has often referred to Carrie and Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) as two of the best films ever made, and has indicated De Palma’s work as the most penetrating social satire to be found in contemporary American cinema.5 As mentioned in the Introduction (pp. 17, 21), De Palma played an important role in Tarantino’s education as a cinephile by introducing him indirectly to Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic approach to cinema. De Palma’ movies are the most explicitly theoretical of those directed by the filmmakers of the New Hollywood. De Palma started his career as one of the numerous followers of the early Godard, a name that Tarantino frequently mentioned in his early interviews, and which is included in the list of authors to which Reservoir Dogs is dedicated. Since his 1973 film Sisters , however, De Palma carried over his highly self-reflexive approach into Hollywood genre cinema, particularly picking up the Hitchcockian thriller. The transformation was rather abrupt and, for some, so complete, that for the rest of his career he would be accused of simply redoing the same, self-referential remake of classical Hollywood genres, with the only variation being the addition of more and more explicit sadistic violence against women. It is no coincidence that similar arguments have often been made about Tarantino and other postmodern filmmakers. Hitchcock, in fact, can be seen as the inspiration for the type of horror cinema in which Clover was interested, as she clearly established by offering in the first chapter of her book a sustained and penetrating discussion of Psycho (1960) (Clover 2015: 23–26). This film is the one to which De Palma has most

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

175

frequently paid homage, directly and indirectly, by developing the theme of the psycho-killer troubled by gender identity and mixing this figure with other Hitchcockian (and, thus, explicitly psychoanalytical) tropes. De Palma also inherited from Hitchcock the aestheticisation of cinema’s ability to manipulate the audience’s reaction, first of all through the use of shocking images and sounds. In the liberal context of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s independent and low-budget cinema, De Palma, Hooper, Carpenter and many other filmmakers discussed by Clover could bring the visual provocations of the British master to another level of visibility. As in De Palma’s work, Tarantino’s approach to horror and exploitation cinema shows how popular genres can be used to develop experimental artistic forms, as well as rather sophisticated theoretical discourses about the nature of cinema, the image and contemporary aesthetics more broadly. David Cronenberg is another author of the same generation that Clover often mentions in her work. While Tarantino does not cite Cronenberg as a model in his interviews, what Clover’s discourse tells us about the cinema of the Canadian filmmaker can be used to talk about the work of his American colleague as well. Like many other critics and scholars before and after her, Clover sees Cronenberg’s work as one of the most significant expressions of the 1970s body horror movement, in which an acute interest in the emergence of electronic media and information society was matched with a stress on the materiality of both machines and humans. This is particularly relevant inasmuch it highlights how this kind of postmodern cinema is more focused on the dialectical links between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ than on the alleged erasure of reality by the hand of Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyperreality. Jameson’s discussion of Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome as a quintessential postmodern film can be mentioned here (Jameson 1990: 22–32), as Clover also focuses on the same work. Partially contradicting Jameson’s somehow dismissive analysis, I would suggest that both of their readings support the idea that the film should not be read through a simplistic interpretation of (Baudrillardian) postmodernism. It is interesting to notice, in fact, how Clover regards Videodrome is one of the most significant horror movies to work through the idea of female masochism (Clover 2015: 196–209). Clover’s analysis supports therefore the impression that Videodrome’s style and narrative, rather than affirming the derealisation of the world through the power of the electronic image, can be seen to represent the realisation of the image, reinforcing its power of seduction, precisely as a result of its ability to activate the viewer’s fetishistic, and here openly masochistic

176

F. PAGELLO

desires. Focusing on the combination of sex and violence, the film indeed stresses how despite its increasing ‘virtualisation’ the (cinematic) image can still hurt the audience, both literally and metaphorically. In my opinion, Clover’s approach to Cronenberg’s work and its links to Jameson’s theory of postmodernism can also be used to approach Tarantino’s cinema, which echoes the 1970s aesthetics of De Palma, Scorsese, and exploitation movies. In the next sections, I will therefore discuss a group of films by Tarantino in which these themes and cinematic references manifest in the direct combination and accumulation of images, sounds and stories inspired exactly by those violent and sexualised films of the 1970s in which Clover was interested. Further, I will explore how Men, Women and Chain Saws provided an explicit theoretical framework to which the writer-director referred in his interviews as well as in the movies themselves.

2

‘This Is Me at My Most Masochistic ’: Kill Bill

Kill Bill —and especially Kill Bill Vol. 1—echoes Clover’s book by unambiguously presenting itself as a (re)mix of 1970s genres into an exploitation film that elicits the viewer’s enjoyment for violence. More than any of Tarantino’s previous works, Kill Bill builds on multiple genres in such an explicit way that it can easily be regarded as a sort of narrative ‘essay’ on the experience of watching exploitation cinema. These genres, moreover, are all linked by Tarantino’s emphasis on the role of extreme violence in them: the martial art movie; the rape-revenge film; the slasher movie, of which the two parts of Kill Bill are reminiscent through the abundance of blood and gory details; and, the Spaghetti Western, whose explicit sadism and sheer brutality are mobilised here in the cruel and sophisticated modes of torture that the characters enact on one another. As already said at the beginning of Chapter 4, the opening lines of Kill Bill pay tribute to Clover’s book in what is likely the most explicit reference to a text of film theory ever to appear in a Hollywood movie. The lines represent a sort of ‘manifesto’ by Kill Bill ’s eponymous character, laying out the theme of both Clover’s book and the film itself. The question about Bill’s (and so many other characters’) sadism is brought to the viewer’s attention from the very first line of dialogue, as the issue of its relationship with his (or the viewer’s?) masochism is presented as the theme that the film will try to flesh out.

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

177

Kill Bill is thus, first of all, a study of the consequences of (the representation of) male violence, which had already been the object of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but is here examined from the perspective of a female character who is at the centre of a master– slave relationship with her oppressor. The centrality of this relationship thus creates a strong parallel with Tarantino’s immediately preceding work, Jackie Brown. Kill Bill , which is somehow a ‘spin-off’ of Pulp Fiction (and the result of the meeting of Thurman and Tarantino on the set of that movie),6 can thus be regarded as a commentary and a reflection on his earlier films, as well as a response to those critics and scholars that had pointed out some stimulating or problematic issues in Tarantino’s approach of the representation of gender identities. While I am not aware of any explicit reference made by the director on the reception of his previous films from this perspective, the fact that it is precisely in this period that he mentioned Clover’s book—in his interviews as well as in the film itself—can certainly be seen as a way to intervene in such debates. From its very first shots (also discussed in Chapter 4), Kill Bill confronts the theme of the male gaze and its sadistic overtones not only through Bill’s words but also the aestheticisation of Thurman’s beaten-up body, preparing us for a narrative and rather graphic engagement with the same material examined by Clover. It is no coincidence that Kill Bill was, and remains till this day Tarantino’s most violent feature. Vol. 1 is particularly gruesome, offering the most iconic, almost (self-)parodic, acts of violence represented in his whole filmography. In contrast to the toned-down register of Jackie Brown, Kill Bill returns to and actually heightens the ‘coolness’ and ‘pulpness’ of his earlier films, reaching unprecedented levels of explicit brutality. Possibly empowered by arguments such as Clover’s, Tarantino directly confronts rather important themes about gender identities, motherhood and patriarchy by reworking 1970s exploitation cinema, which contributes to the fleshing out of his conception of these issues. As a result, what appeared to many, and pour cause, Tarantino’s most ‘postmodern,’ ‘self-reflexive’ and’ ‘playful’ film to date was seen by the director and other critics also as one of his most personal and consciously theoretical works, laying out through the narrative and the sophisticated stylistic layering a conceptual map not only of his cinema, but of the aesthetic and psychoanalytic value of the exploitation cinema that inspired him. In addition to dealing with the themes at the centre of Clover’s book, Kill Bill adopts a ‘dialectical’ perspective similar to Clover’s. This

178

F. PAGELLO

becomes apparent in the way the process of subjectivation is shown through a set of narrative lines based on the master–slave dialectics already at the core of Jackie Brown. The relationships between the Bride and Bill, between Bill and each of the other characters, and the fact that connections among the characters are inevitably influenced by Bill, clearly highlights the instability of the gender and power roles, bringing to light the interdependency between the two poles of such dialectical relationships. As already said in my discussion on Django Unchained, the way in which the film approaches the genres it remixes and manipulates is itself also inherently dialectical. Kill Bill , in fact, thoroughly embraces the aesthetics—and the aestheticisation—of 1970s exploitation cinema, mobilising the audience’s most visceral desires, but at the same time develops a completely lucid discourse about how these genres worked in their time and continue to work in the early 2000s. Of course, what Clover points out in relation to the ‘cross-gender’ experience of the horror movies of that time is also applicable to Tarantino’s own film, which can be seen as a treatise on the ‘female masochism’ of the audience and their alignment with that ultimate ‘final girl’ that is the Bride. The dialectical nature of Kill Bill however goes even deeper, structuring the film as such. The division of the film in two halves, while (and because it was) dictated by commercial considerations, was turned by Tarantino towards an aesthetic, almost theoretical end. Vol. 1 is almost entirely devoted to action scenes, taking Tarantino’s highly aestheticised style to the next level. Most of the criticism about Tarantino cinema laid out by scholars as Polan and Booker might perhaps be really convincing if his films only contained the kind of spectacular scenes that populate most of the first half of Kill Bill . The sheer pleasure of the surface, the reversal of chronology and abandonment of any apparent deeper logic of the recit fix the audience’s attention entirely on the explosive mise en scène, the inventiveness displayed in the mixture of different styles, the blatant visual sophistication, the prominent sound design and above all its hyperbolic and choreographic spectacle of violence. Taken by itself, Vol. 1 is a pure manifestation of sensory excitement, an orgy of references to 1970s pop culture and cinema, so that it has been understandably acclaimed as well as decried for being one of the ultimate (and, for some, a belated) examples of purely playful and meta-cinematographic postmodern film (Malavasi 2017).

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

179

However, as I have noted about other scholarly analysis of individual sequences in Tarantino’s films, it would be misleading to separate the first of Kill Bill from what follows, as they are two halves of a single work. Vol. 2 tells indeed a rather different story—and it does so also by adopting a quite different style. The second part of the movie drastically slows down the pace, focusing on the background story behind the rapid sequence of violent acts in Vol. 1. This latter’s focus on sensory excitement and insistent deconstruction of linear time are thus not the whole point of the film: those spectacular elements are linked to an entire fictional world, populated by rounded characters and stories that flesh out those purely audiovisual figures. Vol. 2 thus emphasises the importance of narrative in the film through its insistence on the representation of the acts of narration. If the movie weren’t still also filled with numerous brutal fights, it might be said that here storytelling replaces the non-stop action scenes of the previous film, since its flashbacks and longue dialogues and monologues bring forward the act of telling stories and, indeed, of talking as an alternative to violence. It is no coincidence, in fact, that Bill’s monologue at the end of Vol. 2 provides is the (anti-) climax for the two-film narrative arc. In his ‘speech,’ Bill plays again the role he had at the beginning of the film, when he ‘summarises’ Clover’s argument about his own masochism. Only, this time, he reverses the perspective. Here Bill highlights how the Bride, and the audience with her, have enjoyed the violence and brutality of the film— both as a victim and as an oppressor. The victim–hero, having survived an endless series of tortures that place the audience in the position of enjoying her ‘female’ masochism, is thus also revealed to have been the vehicle of sadistic impulses. With a last dialectical reversal, the presumption of innocence of the protagonist is questioned, and the meaning of Bride’s last words (‘Thank you’) in the very last scene are left open to the viewer’s interpretation, together with the invitation to participate in the final explosion of the Bride’s emotions and relief. Taken together, the two Volumes manifest to a new degree Tarantino’s dialectical approach to his material—not despite but because of the tension between them. The clear separation between the two crucial aspects of cinema—narrative and spectacle—also highlights its emphasis on the productive tension between the utopian and ideological elements of the cultural imagination expressed by the ‘low’ genres that he resurrects. Their historicity is also made clear, in quintessentially postmodern fashion, through the pastiche of 1970s exploitation cinema, especially its

180

F. PAGELLO

imagery and thematic features. The very simple narrative of a woman taking revenge on her tormenters—a collection of sadistic rapists and killers—is an explicit homage to an earlier historical period, which cannot but remind the viewers of the many different manifestations of the impact of the Women’s Movement on the popular culture of the time, from fashion to sexuality, from visual imagery to narrative genres, from ideological key words to actual changes in social hierarchies. Of course, the film revises this material in light of the (‘late’) postmodern aesthetics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which provides the essential temporal tension that—as explained by Jameson—makes the historicity of the phenomena observed immediately visible. As Men, Women and Chains Saw, and in perfect alignment with it, Kill Bill thus lays out a theoretical discourse about postmodern sensationalist cinema as a machine to both excite the senses and to stimulate theoretical, historical and, finally political interpretation of these films’ cultural significance.

3 The Precarious Nature of the Male Gaze: Death Proof Among Tarantino’s almost uninterrupted string of commercial and critical successes, the place of Death Proof is certainly peculiar. Released two years after the extremely positive box office results of Kill Bill all over the world, it became instead the only real ‘bomb’ in his whole filmography, and it is often ranked as his least appreciated by fans, critics and scholars alike. The film’s unusual mode of delivery (it was distributed in the United States as part of the double-feature event entitled Grindhouse, which included Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and a series of fake trailers of imaginary exploitation movies in pure 1970s style) certainly contributed to its commercial and critical failure, but the main reasons why critics disapproved are nothing new. More than any of his other films, Death Proof was widely regarded as Tarantino’s most nostalgic and plainly fetishistic homage to a, by then, almost entirely forgotten era of exploitation cinema. Many reviews and scholarly accounts largely emphasised (sometimes even as a positive feature) Tarantino’s individual fixation with the creation of a pastichinge of pre-existing stories, characters and images, endless allusions to the popular culture of the 1970s, and, crucially, the apparent complete self-referentiality of these elements. It is not surprising, therefore, that some commentators regarded Death Proof as Tarantino’s

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

181

as the most ‘Baudrillardian’ of his films (Anderson 2007; Uva 2009; Brancati 2014: 122–123). Building on my reading of Clover and Kill Bill , I will suggest that the film is better understood in the context of Tarantino’s development of his own theory about the psychoanalytical and political value of the aesthetics of exploitation cinema. In fact, for those viewers and critics who have paid close attention to Death Proof’ s references to film history and theory, it was actually easier to understand how this film is one of Tarantino’s most obvious reflections on the nature of cinema, cinematic violence and gender.7 While Tarantino has declared on other occasions that he has never been interested in directing a horror film, he has described Death Proof as a tribute to the slasher movie (Tarantino 2007: 8, 11–13).8 This statement is particularly significant, as the connection with that particular genre is solid but not necessarily that palpable: while the story revolves around Stuntman Mike, a stalker who successfully murders a number of young women, a convention of the slasher plot, Death Proof mixes these basic thematic elements with a variety of other cinematic references to other 1970s sub-genres, first of all the ‘car chase movie’ to which the second half of the film is entirely devoted.9 Tarantino’s own description of Death Proof as a slasher thus suggests that we can think of it as in conversation with the critical and theoretical discussion of the genre, and a sort of manifesto on the theoretical conception of the cinematic gaze as was revised by Clover and other Lacanian scholars. Approaching it in this way, one first notices how this film explores and combines the point of view of Stuntman Mike with that of two friend groups of young women, as much as the perspective of the camera. This fact highlights Clover’s idea that horror cinema presents the male gaze as fundamentally unstable. As we have seen, while Mulvey based her theory of classic Hollywood cinema on the assumption that narratives film affirms of the male gaze’s mastery on the diegetic world, Clover insisted that horror movies break the link between the viewer’s point of view and the perspective of the male perpetrator, representing it as always unstable and doomed to fail. While featuring some of the most famous subjective shots in the history of popular cinema (e.g. the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s 1979 Halloween), even the most ‘sadistic’ 1970s slasher films sooner or later have to abandon the point of view of the stalker-killer in order to affirm that of the ‘victim–hero.’ The pleasure produced by these films, in addition to the attraction for the villain’s figure and the

182

F. PAGELLO

physical and emotional excitement provoked by the violence that he exercises, is always based on the audience’s experience of being afraid of the monster, feeling hurt and repelled by the sight of the tortured bodies of the female victimised characters, as well as fascinated and attracted by imagining these characters’ physical and psychological pain. The mastery of the Stuntman Mike (interpreted by Kurt Russell, the protagonist of some important films directed by John Carpenter, including The Thing, a crucial work for Tarantino, see infra, pp. 100, 120) is indeed constantly challenged by all the other characters’ point of view, actions and even dialogues, which often point out the stalker’s fundamental impotence and infantilism. His obsessive attempt to gain and maintain over control the Other’s look through his acts of voyeurism and sadism is indeed ridiculed throughout the film, showing more and more Stuntman Mike’ weaknesses and fundamental ineptitude. The film’s focus in the confrontation between his voyeuristic fantasies of sadistic domination and the girls’ clear exhibitionistic and/or masochistic desires (fully manifested in the scenes of the lap dance and the game ‘Ship’s Mast’) can indeed be interpreted as the actual ‘reason’ for the display of fetishistic imagery and the careful pastiching of 1970s cinema in Death Proof (and Grindhouse in general). As in the slasher film, the rather sudden and gratuitous scenes of violence at the end of both parts of the narrative obviously embody the culmination of the sublimation of sexual tension that is the ‘justification’ of the extreme aestheticisation that infuses all aspects of the film. Stuntman Mike and the first group of girls blatantly embody some unsatisfied sexual desires manifested all of their actions, costumes and dialogues. The two climatic scenes in the first part of Death Proof are, not coincidentally, the lap dance sequence and the final massacre. On the one hand, we witness, often from Mike’s point of view, to the highly aestheticised exhibitionism of the (sexually unsatisfied) woman, whose actions are directly addressed at provoking the man’s arousal; on the other, we have the equally aestheticised violence of the obviously frustrated man, who was the object of the previous performance and becomes here the subject of an action of absolute brutality, the expression of his complete impotence. As in the purest slasher film, the insistence on the details of the slaughter of the female body can thus be seen not only as the ‘representation’ of Mike’s and the audience’s sadism but also as manifestation of the viewer’s enjoyment in experiencing the masochistic pleasures offered by the genre.

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

183

This ambivalent representation of violence is repeated, as in a variation, in the second part of the film. Here the girls manifest their masochistic tendencies in a very different way, perfectly embodied by the Ship’s Mast game. Compared to the scene of the lap dance in the first part of the movie, this latter points at these characters’ much more extreme fantasies, in which the male look does not hold any place. The research for pleasurein-pain, that is, does not pass through the interpellation of the male ‘sadist,’ but expresses this different form of ‘female masochism’ embodied by the characters.10 When the stalker attacks, moreover, his intrusion provokes another, unexpected reaction, as the girls decide to take revenge, now show their own sadism. This very last part of Death Proof is devoted to Mike’s chase by the group of girls and to the rather brutal scene in which these latter beat to death Stuntman Mike with their bare hands and feet. The ending of the film thus highlights another connection between (the second half of) Death Proof and Kill Bill (Vol. 2), as well as between both films and Clover’s interest in the rape-revenge film. Death Proof is indeed (the second) part of a sort of trilogy devoted to revenge narratives focused on female characters, which starts with the story of the Bride, and continue with that of Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds . As I pointed out in the previous section, also Kill Bill concludes its representation of the revengeful heroine highlighting that, for all the importance assigned to the protagonist’s and the viewers’ ‘masochism,’ her sadism was present as well throughout the movie, in the action of the protagonist as much as in the enjoyment that the audience felt by witnessing to her brutal acts of revenge. The same operation is repeated at the end of Death Proof, and later in Inglourious Basterds , which shows the consistency of Tarantino’s play with highlighting the mobile and contradictory alignment of the viewers’ perspective with each of these two poles. This solution also stresses once again the usefulness of a dialectical approach to Tarantino’s work. As Jackie Brown and Kill Bill , Death Proof seems to allude to the logical of the master–slave dialectics as the matrix of any narratives of emancipation and revenge. The fact that two of the girls of the second group (obviously a double for those of the first part of the film) are stuntwomen as their stalker, and the way in which they quickly move from masochism and sadism to punishing their former oppressor clearly suggest how all of these relationships are not binary oppositions, but a set of contradictions and a continuous string of dialectical reversals. This apparently ‘minor’ and a bit neglected work can therefore be regarded as one of the most explicitly theoretical works in Tarantino’s

184

F. PAGELLO

filmography, continuing the attempt of the writer-director to engage in a conversation with critics of his cinema as well as of the exploitation films to which he is paying homage. From this perspective, Death Proof ’s extreme and fetishistic aestheticisation could be interpreted as the opposite of an escape into nostalgia: it is an examination of a series of old film genres which might illuminate both their historical context as well as the audience’s present situation, first of all by prompting the viewer to follow its dialectical approach to the film’s play with different temporalities, aesthetics and narrative turns.

4 History as (Horror) Cinema: Inglourious Basterds That Death Proof was immediately followed by a film as different from it as Inglourious Basterds is perhaps yet another indication of Tarantino’s dialectical approach to the elaboration of his filmography. Once again, Tarantino seems to have reflected on the conversations his work had sparked and to respond to those discussions in his newest film. Whereas Kill Bill and Death Proof could be seen as provocatively embracing the accusations of Tarantino’s detractors about his cinema’s self-referentiality and indifference to ethics, history or politics, Inglourious Basterds abandoned for the first time the purely fictional worlds in which all of Tarantino’s films had been set so far, situating itself in the most devastating conflict in human history, World War II.11 Of course, Inglourious Basterds still shows a very ‘postmodern’ approach, first and foremost by adopting the device of alternate history and displaying an obvious metafictional element (von Dassanowsky 2012; Roche 2018: 15–24, 28–31). And, yet, the film indicates a real break with Tarantino’s previous work. From then on, all of his films would be set in precise historical contexts, explicitly engaging with crucial sociopolitical issues or tragic, historical events. This thematic shift is accompanied by a formal one. In particular, the complicated non-linear structure considered a signature of his earlier style is abandoned for good. All of Tarantino’s films after Inglourious Basterds would be structured in an increasingly linear fashion (if flashbacks keep appearing, they become precisely that: glimpses into the past, instead of an element of a more sophisticated play with temporal successions): Django Unchained lays out Tarantino’s most classical, mythic narrative of the hero’s origin; The Hateful Eight tells a linear story running over

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

185

a single day, except for the inclusion of a ‘traditional’ flashback; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood focuses on a chronological presentation of ‘two-and-a-half days in the life’ of a small group of characters. This new set of narratives is inaugurated by Inglourious Basterds , whose epic, linear narrative focuses on a sequence of highly (melo)dramatic events, from the massacre of the family of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) by the hand of SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) to the former’s revenge against the latter. The parallel story of the mission carried out by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his ‘Basterds’ behind enemy lines does not disrupt this plot line, as the two stories finally merge with the massacre of the Nazis and Landa’s ‘punishment’ at the hand of the Americans. This short summary highlights a thread of continuity between Inglourious Basterds , Tarantino’s two previous films, and Clover’s book: the theme, as well as the form, of the revenge narrative. Shoshanna’s story, in fact, echoes those of the Bride in Kill Bill and the girls assaulted by Mike in Death Proof, becoming the third and final instalment of a trilogy centred around the vengeance taken by a female character on her male oppressor(s). These parallels also suggest that key themes of sadism and masochism are also at the centre of Inglourious Basterds film. Landa’s peculiar character is based on the combination of his mastery of dispassionate, logical rationality with the obscene enjoyment of his sadistic impulses. From the opening scene, the viewer is led to participate in the pleasure that Landa gets from exercising and showing off his intelligence, manifested in the first place through his command over language—and, indeed, multiple languages. Displaying Landa’s relishing of his ability to torture his listener through the use of English and French, the first scene confronts the viewer with a series of horror film elements: Landa’s figure, at the same time fascinating, comedic and terrifying; a sympathetic farmer, father of innocent girls and defender of the persecuted Jews, threatened by the Nazi; an increasing and protracted suspense; the sudden, brutal massacre of Shoshanna’s family; her successful escape, as an ideal final girl. As in the slasher movies analysed by Clover, the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds appears to combine the ‘sadistic’ pleasure of observing Landa’s masterful torturing of his ‘prey’ with the masochistic enjoyment of his victims’ psychological and physical suffering. While apparently changing genre, Tarantino thus further develops the same theoretical discourse at the centre of Kill Bill and Death Proof, reflecting on the ability of cinema

186

F. PAGELLO

to address, and manipulate, the viewer’s unconscious experience in more or less subtle ways. An overtly sadistic impulse, moreover, is what the German and the American characters have in common. From their very first appearance, the Basterds are shown to deeply enjoy the execution of complicated act of physical and psychological torture on their Nazi ‘prey,’ and the spectator is asked to participate in the comedic but also disturbing effect of such representation of the film’s ‘goodies.’ While this further confirms the relation with the themes of Kill Bill and Death Proof, from a formal perspective Inglourious Basterds addresses these aspects in different ways than its predecessors. In what follows, I will focus on one key stylistic feature which distinguishes Inglourious Basterds from Tarantino’s earlier films: the repeated use of extended scenes of sustained suspense. From the scene the opens the film, already discussed, to the one set in the underground tavern, from Shoshanna’s meeting with Landa at the restaurant to the grand finale in the film theatre, Inglourious Basterds is more than any other Tarantino’s film a series of long, relatively contained narrative blocks, each built around a suspenseful situation (Bordwell 2011, 2014). Once again, this specific stylistic approach is explicitly indebted to Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, which is here, more openly than ever, Tarantino’s declared model. It is not on the influence of the Italian director, however, that I will focus here. As I have argued earlier on, it is interesting to look at Tarantino’s films as an accumulation of semi-independent sequences and to consider this aspect as a sign of De Palma’s impact on his style (see infra, pp. 17, 21, 34, 59). The name of the Italian-American director obviously brings forwards Inglourious Basterds less obvious links to the New Hollywood and the 1970s horror films studied by Clover. In the specific case of Inglourious Basterds , in particular, I suggest that the insistence on the explicit construction of suspense is more crucial for the film’s aesthetic than its (usual) brutal representation of violence. In this sense, Inglourious Basterds draws a direct connection not only with De Palma but also with his explicit model: Alfred Hitchcock, which, as Clover is keen to notice, was the precursor of the slasher movie with his groundbreaking Psycho (1960). As the British master, Tarantino mixes of suspense and violence can be seen as a sign of the film’s reflexivity, not to be understood as self-referentiality but as a theoretical discourse on the way in which cinema works. In keeping with its allusions to DePalma and Hitchcock, the film takes as one of its subjects cinema’s manipulation of the viewer and the psychoanalytical value of such operation,

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

187

combining intensification of the audience’s sensory experience with a masterful use of suspense. In doing so, it synthesizes techniques found in horror films like Psycho with key features of other cinematic genres, from classical war cinema to Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), from the aforementioned Spaghetti Westerns to other 1970s B-movies such as the original Inglorious Bastards by Enzo G. Castellari (1978). Mixing all these different genres with a quasi-Hitchcockian approach, which also included an apparent commercial savviness, Tarantino was likely reacting to the disappointment of Death Proof by directing what in some respects is his most thrilling film, which would become one of his biggest commercial hits. Tarantino consciously shifted the audiences’ attention to a different kind of spectacle, adopting different production and stylistic strategies: he not only constructed Inglourious Basterds as high profile cinematic event, a long epic war film featuring a prominent star such as Brad Pitt, but also permeated its long sequences of dialogue with suspense that constantly holds the viewer in a state of tension. This incursion into an actual historical context and, specifically, the engagement with the theme of World War II has of course even deeper and obviously dialectical implications. Epoch-changing conflicts such as this one are always the product of the clash of different historical temporalities embodied by the different nations in the struggle—as we as seen, according to Jameson’s theory, this is the only way in which history can actually be made visible in narrative as well as in historiography (see infra, pp. 85–89). Crucially for the topic of this book, Inglourious Basterds stages WWII as the threshold between (European) modernity and (American) postmodernity, which is laid out by comparing and contrasting these two historical, geographic and cultural contexts through the film’s selfreflexive discourse on the power of cinema. At the centre of Inglourious Basterds lies indeed a reflection about the uses of film, and culture more broadly, in the military and political struggles that marked the course of the twentieth century. These themes are not only apparent through the usual, more or less implicit references to film history, but become here part of the narrative: from the key role played by an imaginary film of Nazi propaganda, Nation’s Pride, produced by Goebbels himself, to the characters of a French film theatre owner and a British film critic who use their professional activities as weapons against the Germans, the production, distribution and consumption of cinema is shown to be part of the war effort.

188

F. PAGELLO

The film’s emphasis on the link between cinema and totalitarianism has led scholars to evoke Adorno and Horkheimer, Lyotard, Agamben and Rancière, all of whom dealt with the problematic relationship between culture and politics after WWII and the representation of the Holocaust (von Dassanowsky 2012; Grosoli 2013; Haslam 2015). As is well known, Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectics of the Enlightenment laid out their vision of a dystopian modernity in which rationality is turned into the instrument for oppression, first of all through the use of mass media apparatuses—and, primarily of cinema—to achieve complete ideological domination. In a way, the narrative and characters in Inglourious Basterds seem to echo their discourse, especially given the crucial role of cinema in Nazi propaganda and the mixture of modernity and barbarism that characterises both the Germans and the Americans (von Dassanowsky 2012; Richardson 2012; Suleiman 2014; Butter 2015; Setka 2015; Chrystall 2015). What I want to particularly stress here, however, is how from now on Tarantino started to include in his stories more and more references to European culture in order to develop his reflections on American history, whose unsolved links to its past of slavery would become in fact the centre of the two subsequent films, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Inglourious Basterds thus start placing the work of the writer-director against an even more ambitious theoretical background, which explicitly addresses one of the most important cultural phenomena that gave shape postmodern culture: the philosophical reflection on the reversal of modern European utopias and ideologies—the Enlightenment, German Idealism—into the roots of nineteenth and twentieth-century catastrophes.12 This brief discussion of the film could not explore the extremely significant ways in which these thematic and formal ingredients are explored in Inglourious Basterds in relation to crucial issues in postmodern theory, especially the ethics and the politics of representation. Coherently with the theme of this chapter, my goal here was different, and more modest: to highlight how this film continued Tarantino’s explicit engagement with the themes and approach laid out in Clover’s book, and how the theoretical ambitions of his work became even more evident in a film that explores cinema’s ability to combine violent and suspenseful scenes to produce a specific aesthetic experience in the viewer, and to elicit a reflection about the politics of representation.

5

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

189

(Exploitation) Cinema as History: Once upon a Time… in Hollywood

Whereas Inglourious Basterds introduced History into Tarantino’s films by showing the role of the cinema in transforming global political-military events into entertainment, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood moves in the opposite direction. The film focuses on the movie industry itself to reflect on how its own particular history is deeply symptomatic of History at large. The subject of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is not simply how movies (and TV series) are made ‘in general,’ but how they were made at a particular moment in time. In particular, the film explores the multiple, competing modes of production adopted by different branches of the film and television industries in the late 1960s. Further, it highlights the dialectical relationship between classical American and (post)modern European cinemas, on the one hand, and Hollywood and television, on the other. Like its predecessor, therefore, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood aims to make visible the historicity (the ‘making of’) filmmaking, reflecting another sequence of epoch-changing events. As is the case for several films about Hollywood, such as the seminal Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1950), Tarantino sets his story at a turning point in the development of the American film industry: the transition between the Old and the New Hollywood, as seen through the perspective of a group of actors and professionals working in the industry during the Spring and the Summer of 1969. As is well known, this period marked the very sunset of the classical studio system and the rise of a new approach to filmmaking, deeply transformed by the influence of independent producers and directors, European auteurs, exploitation genres, Asian cinemas, as well as (post-)modern television and music. The tragic and highly ‘symbolic’ story of the murder of Sharon Tate, which the firsttime viewer would expect to be the climax of the narrative, is thus only the best-known factual event around which the film builds its elegy to a truly historical moment in the development of American culture and society. Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood makes history appear through the collision between different real and imagined temporalities, a process which Jameson has theorised (see infra, pp. 105–106). Tarantino’s take on the genre of ‘movies-about-Hollywood,’ as in his WWII-movie and his Westerns, develops a reflection of the history of cinema as part of larger History.13 Unlike Inglourious Basterds and The Hateful Eight , however, the material is not only known by Tarantino from

190

F. PAGELLO

his reading of history books and consumption of popular culture: Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is also an attempt to rebuild, literally and fantastically, the world that gave birth to the, thoroughly ‘postmodern,’ imagination of the young Tarantino, born in 1963. The writer-director, in fact, asked and obtained the largest budget of his career (around ninety million dollars) to bring to life his childhood memories of late 1960s Los Angeles and popular culture by designing with his collaborators a series of extensive sets carefully reconstructing the actual locations and studio sets of fictional films and TV shows of the era.14 This very personal film is thus a multi-layered puzzle of sounds and images taken from Tarantino’s still lively sensory memory and child-like imagination of his very early years. He, more than ever, acts as a DJ, mixing the soundtrack of his childhood with endless visual homages to the sounds and the images of Los Angeles during that era. The musical and elegiac tone of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood contributes to the work’s self-reflexive discourse on its own historicity. The little fictional world it depicts is a social universe in transition: the stories of Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio), Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie)—despite their fairy-tale resolution—are narratives about the ending of the Fifties and Sixties utopias and ideologies and the melancholic portrayal of the emergence of the new postmodern, deeply disillusioned culture. Besides contributing to the complex allegorical signification of the film, Tarantino’s take on the aesthetics of this period carries on his theoretical reflection on the role of aestheticisation in exploitation cinema, adding an additional layer through the representation of the world behind the camera. In my discussion of the film, I will concentrate on the role of Cliff Booth’s figure in the narrative, aesthetic and theoretical aspects of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, as this character offers an unusual and revealing addition to Tarantino’s representation of Hollywood. The portrayal of a struggling, humble, middle-aged stuntman describes a very different experience from those usually at the centre of other movies about Hollywood, typically focused around actors, directors or even screenwriters fighting to affirm their artistic freedom, achieving success and dealing with its subsequent discontents and inevitable decline (e.g. Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, 1950; The Barefoot Contessa, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Robert Aldrich, 1967; Barton Fink, Coen Brothers, 1991; Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, 2001). These latter aspects, as a matter of fact, are perfectly

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

191

embodied by the figures of Rick Dalton and Sharon Tate and their parallel story arcs, which further emphasizes Tarantino’s decision to place Cliff at the centre of the film, where he acts as the point of connection between the two stories of the other two protagonists, the (fictional) stars in the film. Cliff’s ‘strange adventure,’ culminating in the final orgy of violence discussed in detail later on, illuminates why the aesthetics of exploitation cinema offers, for Tarantino, a way into the aesthetic power of cinema as such. The ending of Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood moreover helps explain why Tarantino turns, once again, to the peculiar politics of aesthetics to be found in 1960s and 1970s exploitation cinema to express both the ideological and the utopian tendencies at the core of postmodern culture and, this time, to represent a crucial moment in the history of Hollywood and American society more broadly. As in Inglourious Basterds , Tarantino looks at the emergence of postmodernity and focuses on some of the key contradictions of that era. On the one hand, the film highlights the proliferation of new social and gender identities, leading to the decline of the blatantly sexist and racist culture of the 1950s; on the other, it portrays the ending of the Sixties as a moment in which many of the utopias of the new generation were immediately, and tragically, disappointed. The celebration of Sharon Tate’s figure and, especially, the counterfactual ending combine the device of alternative history of Inglourious Basterds with the fairy-tale approach of Django Unchained to ‘rescue’ the memory of the actress from its exclusive association to murders committed by the Manson Family, and to turn her into a symbol of some of the utopian ideas of that era. At the same time, the film alerts viewers that what they are seeing is a pure fantasy, thus reminding them also of the dramatic reality of what really happened. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood can thus be interpreted as a work which highlights the importance of not accepting acritically the ideological celebration or, vice versa, apocalyptic descriptions of postmodernism, and which simultaneously advocates for the preservation of the utopian glimpses that contributed to the emergence of postmodernity in the 1960s.15 The film revisits the excitement and the hopes promoted by the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s and imagines a different destiny for them. In doing so it reflects on what these hopes meant from a historical perspective. Depicting the late Sixties as neither the catastrophic consummation of modern utopias (as an insistence of the atrocity of the Tate murder could have been interpreted), nor as a euphoric embracing

192

F. PAGELLO

of the latest ideologies (as any naïve representation of the Sixties might have suggested), Tarantino shows the end of that crucial decade as the moment in which two temporalities collided, leading to the rise of a new phase, in which women and minorities can find more opportunities to be represented (first of all, in cinema), but where ruthless competition and widespread violence did not cease to reproduce new hierarchical structures based on class, gender and race divisions. This idea, which brings us back to Clover’s analysis of exploitation cinema and the impact of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, is clearly thematised in the film. On the one hand, it appears in the declining fictional careers of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth; on the other, it emerges through the representation of actual Hollywood stars Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, and Bruce Lee, as well as the hippie characters. Following Clover, it is easy to notice how all of these latter are associated with the late Sixties phenomena that would challenge established social hierarchies, starting with the representation of gender in classical Hollywood cinema. While Polanski’s character is given little space, he is clearly shown as a symbol of the new, androgynous type that will dominate popular culture in the Seventies. His films are quintessential examples of the cultural changes cited above: Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which Rick Dalton mentions in an early scene, represents of course a crucial piece in the history of the horror genre, especially as concerns the representation of gender identities. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood offers a completely ethereal representation of Sharon Tate’s figure, which appears as the embodiment of the innocence, beauty and joy advertised and/or dreamed by Sixties mainstream and underground popular culture. Tate is also directly linked to Bruce Lee, as the former is shown to have been trained by the latter to perform some of martial arts sequences of The Wrecking Crew (Phil Karlson, 1968), which her character goes to see in a remarkable scene that allows Tarantino to symbolize, in her success, the rise of the New Hollywood and to make the audience participate in the experience of watching a movie in a 1960s Los Angeles theatre. All these characters allude to the emergence of new kind of cinema, allowing for a different aesthetics that gives more room to new images of female heroes as well as black and Asian heroes, which clearly challenges the centrality of white masculinity embodied by Rick and Cliff. The crucial contrast between these latter and the hippies couldn’t make this theme more explicit. Obviously embodying the epitome of 1960s utopias as well as their reversal into a nightmare, the hippie characters are introduced

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

193

for the first time in a dreamy sequence in which a group of girls sing and dance in the street (the music is a song written by Manson himself); they are repeatedly shown to condemn 1950s TV shows and contemporary news as part of the same militaristic culture; and they are associated with New Horror cinema in the scene at Spahn Movie Ranch (evidently alluding to films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and in the brutal sequence that brings the movie to its closure. All of these characters, that is, are linked by the fact that they represent a new culture, questioning the identification of the modern subject with the masterful, male characters that largely dominated classical Hollywood cinema. In different ways, these figures and the film genres they evoke seem to challenge the ‘sadistic,’ male gaze allegedly at the core of mainstream popular culture. At the same time, these figures also indicate something else: a clear tendency to cancel the individuality of each discreet subject, as is particularly evident in the representation of the members of the Manson family. Crucially, this erasure is also the immediate cause for the (attempted) murder of Sharon Tate. This contradictory depiction therefore highlights both the emancipatory value and tragic effects of these new tendencies, so that Once upon a Time… in Hollywood can be seen as the representation of both the utopian elements and the ideological implications of postmodern culture. Interestingly enough, the actual protagonists of the film are very different. Two middle-aged white men, openly racist, annoyed by if not aggressive towards the hippies, one of whom has murdered his own wife, Rick and Cliff embody instead the declining patriarchal culture. This association is also made evident by the popular genres to which they are linked. Constantly recognised by the other characters as the protagonist of an old 1950s Western TV show, Rick’s identity is linked to the classical image of the male individual fighting to prevail in an overwhelmingly white society. Rick’s frustrated desire for control is explicitly at the centre of the film’s opening and closing sequences, entirely focused on his, carefully manufactured, cool persona. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, however, is not about Rick’s successful career. Quite to the contrary, his entire storyline deals with his struggle against an inevitable decline and the melancholy he feels about his vanishing fame. Every sequence devoted to Rick confronts us with his problems of self-confidence, lucidity or self-discipline. The central scenes devoted to his difficulties during the shooting of the pilot of the TV show Lancer are only the climax

194

F. PAGELLO

of his narrative. Even the ending of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, apparently offering Dalton an imaginary victory, actually stresses his fundamental dependence on someone else’s labour and/or recognition, e.g. Cliff’s psychological and physical abilities or Sharon Tate’s stardom status. This is, of course, another example of the master–slave dialectics that structures Rick’s relationships to the other characters, as well as the film and TV industry. It is no coincidence that the real centre of the film is found in the figure of Rick’s ‘slave,’ Cliff, and, in particular, in the bond between Cliff and Rick, through which the film fully develops the complex and indeed contradictory nature of both characters. Predictably, I suggest that the rapport between the declining star and his stunt double portrays another purely dialectical relationship. The connection between Rick and Cliff takes the form of a master–slave relationship, which simultaneously stresses their interdependence and allows for the expression of each character’s stronger subjectivity in comparison to the film’s other characters. The centrality of Cliff’s figure, in fact, represents an obvious alternative to the (progressive) libertarianism embodied by the multitude of characters described above. Strongly associated with his loyal dog Brandy (instrumental in the denouement of the plot, i.e. in the elimination of the homicidal hippies), Cliff serves as Rick’s ‘double’ not only as a stuntman but also a factotum and a ‘good friend’ (the last words spoken by Rick to Cliff just before the final sequence). Cliff’s relationship to his boss, as a result, does not show the same kind of unconscious and, thus, much more oppressive dependence that all other characters clearly manifest towards a variety of authority figures (from the fanatic members of the ‘Family’ towards Manson to—in completely different ways—Tate, Polanski and Rick in relation to the representatives of the media industry). While each of these characters palpably expresses their irresistible need to obtain some sort of recognition through material success, fame and in any case the approval of someone else, Cliff, manifests a clear detachment from the ambitions and the fears of his employer, Rick, even if he is always shown to be grateful and loyal to him. Cliff’s approach to his subordinate position thus appears to be shaped by a dialectical relationship which neither overestimates the independence of the ‘master’ nor erases the margin of freedom of the ‘slave.’ It is thus obvious why it is Cliff—not Dalton, Polanski or Lee—who is assigned the role of the antagonist of the fanatic hippies.

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

195

It could be useful to go back at his point to the themes explored by Men, Women and Chain Saws, as the figure of Cliff Booth can be linked to two key topics in Clover’s book: the representation of violence and the relationship between sadism and masochism. The nature of Cliff’s and Rick’s relationship and the brutal violence enacted by Pitt’s character at Spahn Movie Ranch as well as in the penultimate scene make it easy to identify the links between Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and the other films discussed earlier on. Building on my discussion of Kill Bill , Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds, as well as my previous examination of Jackie Brown and Django Unchained, I will highlight the importance of the implicit psychoanalytic approach to the master–slave dialectics that appear to be at the core of most—if not all—of Tarantino’s films. As said earlier, in the Lacanian psychoanalytical framework that informs Clover’s approach as well as Žižek’s, human desire is thought to be fundamentally masochistic. The root of the master–slave dialectic lies in the subject’s unconscious desire to be recognised by the Other, which necessarily establishes their mutual dependence. The slave’s desire can immediately be recognised as masochistic, as it based on the subject’s (partially voluntary) submission to the master’s dominance. But, the opposite is also true, as the dialectical nature of such a relationship comes from its dynamic nature: the master, therefore, is revealed to depend on the slave’s labour.16 The two subjects are thus shown to be at the centre of a never-ending struggle which constantly threatens the stability of each one’s position, potentially leading to a reversal of their roles, or alternatively to their mutual destruction. As we have seen, in the case of horror cinema this model suggests that the relationship between the victim and the oppressor must also be seen as contradictory, and reversible, so that the viewer’s solid identification with the camera’s point of view and/or with the (temporarily) dominant character can be continually challenged by the film’s narrative and stylistic choices. In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, all of this is evident in the representation of Cliff, who is obviously described as a contradictory figure: a ‘war hero,’ a ‘wife murderer,’ a tough and violent man, Cliff is at the same time portrayed as a humble and somehow submissive worker, quietly accepting ‘fair’ punishments17 and even the childish, capricious behaviour of his employer. The viewer’s alignment to his point of view is regularly split between the empowering image of Cliff’s cool appearance and behaviour, and the humbling and even threatening situations in which he is placed.

196

F. PAGELLO

What is most interesting for my argument is how Tarantino plays on this ambivalence to manipulate the audience’s reaction to the representation of Cliff’s violence. The aforementioned scene set at the Spahn Movie Ranch provides the first occasion that sees Cliff in a situation which immediately reminds us of a horror movie. Ostensibly outnumbered by hostile characters (who, at his stage, we expect to be shown as complicit in the massacre of Sharon Tate), he is placed in an unsettling context, whose disturbing features are highlighted both visually and through the film’s soundtrack. The scene is thus obviously intended to allude to the suspense and the ‘masochistic’ enjoyment produced by horror movies. As is predictable in a Tarantino’s movie, a sudden, violent act takes place. However, instead of being confronted with an aggression to the protagonist we witness Cliff’s brutal beating of a(n unarmed) hippie character. While likely enjoying the renewed proof of the protagonist’s competence, as well as the fact that he’s arguably acting in self-defence, the audience is thus faced—not for the first time in this film—with the obvious fact that one of the most sympathetic characters in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is a brutal individual, whose violence makes the audience tremble, even if simply because of the surprise provoked by his sudden moves. It is also worth noting that in a typical slasher the hippie characters would have been the protagonists—that is, the victims—of the film, working as alter-egos of their audience. The scene at Spahn Movie Ranch ostensibly plays around these tropes, keeping us in trepidation for Cliff, only to be startled by the realisation that the source of the violence is actually him. A similarly unsettling situation is repeated, and with higher intensity, in the semi-final scene of the film, with the sudden violence exercised by Cliff, Brandi (the dog), and Rick on the hippies who attack them. While this time the protagonists are responding to a deadly threat, and his action lets the protagonists ‘save’ Sharon Tate from the Manson Family, the brutality showed by Cliff, Brandi and Rick has a shocking, if also absurdly comedic, value. Exposing the audience to such an exhibition of violence shows again the influence of the horror genre on a film which otherwise would have been remembered as his least violent in Tarantino’s filmography. Beside highlighting the humorous sadism manifested in the same scene by Rick, it is on Cliff’s behaviour that I want to continue to focus my attention as concerns this scene. Here, Brad Pitt’s character is certainly presented as the ‘hero’ who defeats the villains, putting himself in danger and succeeding in saving a number of innocents, including, above all, Sharon Tate. What matters

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

197

more for the experience of the audience, however, is the suddenness of his violence—the unexpected acceleration of his body’s movements— stressed by the fast editing and a soundtrack dominated by loud music and the screams of his victims. As in many other sequences in Tarantino’s films, the brutality that Cliff unleashes on the bodies of the three hippies provokes a mixture of comedic and horrific effects in the audience, making them uncertain about the nature of their enjoyment. The level of gore is clearly aimed to provoke this reaction in the viewer, activating the kind of shock and excitement with which exploitation cinema aimed to provide its audience. In this sense, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood displays once again the same oscillation between the position of the sadist and that of the masochist to be found in 1970s horrors, with the additional—typically Tarantinoesque—effect of making viewers aware of the obvious enjoyment they are experiencing in looking at such violence, in order to leave them decide whether such a feeling is entirely innocent.

6

Conclusion

In these last few, concluding pages, I will keep focusing on the issue of representation and enjoyment of violence in cinema, only this time by looking at Tarantino’s direct interventions in this debate. His commentary will also lead me back to a topic addressed in the Introduction: the question of the usefulness of a label such as ‘late postmodernity’ to mark a difference between Tarantino’s films and the cinema of the previous period. I will start by quoting a very well-known statement by the (late) modernist director who inspired the early films of both Brian De Palma and Tarantino himself: Jean-Luc Godard. In responding to critics who attacked him for the allegedly graphic representation of violence and, particularly, the supposed overuse of blood in his 1965 film Pierrot le fou, Godard famously commented: ‘It’s not blood, it’s red.’ Exposed to similar criticism for his entire career, Tarantino has addressed the controversies about the role of violence in his films by simply repeating this simple (and yet, still controversial) idea. In an interview released to MTV at the end of 2015, Tarantino declared: I’m a cheerleader towards violence in cinema. I have no problem with saying I like violent movies, and I respond to violent movies, and I actually think violence is…in some ways cinema reaching one of its fullest

198

F. PAGELLO

potentials. I have absolutely no hypocrisy or contradiction whatsoever. I abhor violence in real life, and I can love it in genre, and I can love it in stories, and I can love it in novels, I love violent anime, and I always have. (…) I’m so unapologetic about it. (…) I’m not sheepish about it, I don’t have to walk back on my heels and come up with a moral justification, it needs no justification. (…) And people can absolutely, positively, accuse my movies of being bloodthirsty. And they might very well be right. And if that’s not your cup of tea, then you should drink another cup of tea.18

In an earlier interview, released in 2003, Tarantino responded to the film critic of San Francisco’s Kron 4 TV, Jan Wahl, literally shouting out his most honest argument in ‘defence’ of his approach to the cinematic representation of violence. To the direct question ‘Why all this violence?’ he simply answered: ‘Because it is so much fun!’ In what followed, Wahl asked Tarantino to justify his statement that Kill Bill would be a good movie for twelve-year-old kids to watch, something she found questionable as they would not be able to tell difference between real and screen violence. To this objection, Tarantino replied that he grew up with this kind of film and he could perfectly tell the difference.19 The writerdirector, in fact, has used this argument in many interviews, adding an interesting anecdote in a recent interview focused on his sources of inspiration for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.20 At the age of 9 or 10, wondering about why his mother took him to see violent movies that were forbidden for his friends and classmates—including a double feature of The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)—he asked why he was allowed to be exposed to such violent films. Reportedly, the answer was: ‘There is nothing that you are going to see in a movie that is going to screw you up. I am more worried when you are watching the news. It is just a damn movie!’ Of course, these statements do not interest me here in order to understand Tarantino’s biographical and psychological background; rather, they are interesting insofar as they help qualify the director’s theoretical position, pointing to the historical and cultural context at the centre of Clover’s book, as well as his own films—starting with his most ‘autobiographical’ work, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. What is at stake here is precisely the issue of representation, that is, the way in which (late?) postmodern viewers relate to what is depicted on the screen. In another significant interview, for example, Tarantino offered a revealing answer to the vexed question concerning the morality of representations

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

199

of violence and, much more broadly, to the problem of representation as such. The writer-director stated again that he had always rejected the idea that the audience could mistake what they saw on the screen for something real, while simultaneously denying that his movies should be perceived as more self-referential than other films. To illustrate his understanding of the relationship between the viewer and what is represented on the screen, he made a telling comparison: for Tarantino someone watching a film is always aware of what they are doing in the same way as when someone is driving is always aware that they are driving. But, crucially, he added, someone who is watching a film is not constantly focused on thinking that they are watching a film: being aware of what one is doing, even in the case of consuming fiction, does not mean that one is not to also be completely immersed in this activity (Peary 2013: 164). For Tarantino, therefore, the cinematic representation of violence is ‘fun’ precisely because it is just that: ‘representation.’ The viewer is conscious that it is not real, that it cannot ‘screw you up,’ and for this very reason is also free to fully enjoy it on a purely aesthetic level. This does not mean, however, that cinema exclusively provides meaningless sensory excitement, good only for eliciting playful, sadistic fantasies. The fact that cinematic violence cannot literally hurt the viewer does not mean that cinema cannot hit her on a different level—sensual, emotional or intellectual: films are fictional and, yet, their ‘effects’ on the spectators might be ‘real,’ if—and only if —those spectators approach them in the right way. As concerns the representation of violence and, for that matter, of anything else, this means that we are confronted with a contradictory situation. Films must be seen only as films—and therefore they are allowed to be completely ‘amoral,’ even ‘apolitical’—and, yet, cinema should be considered as something that matters, since it influences our lives by shaping our way of seeing, feeling and thinking. Cinema matters not because it imposes a certain representation of reality or because it enforces a certain ideology: on the contrary, as Rancière has put it, film can allow the audience to modify the way they relate to the world and, thus, contributes to ‘redistributing the sensible.’ ∗ ∗ ∗ We can now go back to where we started, with another contradictory situation, which I tried to capture in my discussion of the idea of ‘late

200

F. PAGELLO

postmodernity.’ As stated in the Introduction, this expression would indicate that the historical moment in which postmodernism, as a cultural logic and ideology, was dominant is clearly over, and, yet, at the same time postmodernity, as a social-historical formation, is not finished. We haven’t gone beyond the post-Fordist world, in which the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism brought about the (misplaced) impression that the power of mass media would render modern aesthetics and dialectical thinking obsolete. As long as this context is not surpassed, the notion of postmodernity can still be relevant to an understanding of our times. However, if aesthetics and dialectics retain their usefulness in the interpretation of contemporary culture and society, as I tried to argue building on Rancière, Jameson, Zizek and Clover’s theorical approaches, then we might think that we are postmodern in a different way than we were a few decades ago. Maybe, Jameson’s famous statement could be now paraphrased as follows: ‘it is safest to grasp the concept of late postmodernity as a way to think historically in an age that had forgotten to think historically in the first place.’ As my discussion of the films written and directed by Tarantino has suggested, contemporary cinema might thus express the ability to think again in historical as well as utopian ways, avoiding both the illusions of modernism and the disillusionment of postmodernism. On the one hand, Tarantino’s films remind us that cinematic utopias are destined to remain that: the imaginary realization of some impossible fantasy.21 ‘History is what hurts,’ Jameson also wrote, and (even postmodern) cinema can help us learn this lesson in its own way. On the other hand, however, films such as Tarantino’s also confront us with the ability of aesthetic experiences to influence culture and society. Cinema provokes the audience both emotionally and intellectually, as this chapter has tried to show by engaging with Clover’s book and arguing for the necessity of adopting a specific perspective, both affective and intellectual, to fully appreciate the treatment of violence in Tarantino’s movies. By engaging with Rancière’s work at the beginning of this book I suggested that a specific theoretical approach to Tarantino’s cinema might lead us to acknowledge how cinema is one place where a peculiar type of utopia still survives in contemporary culture, disproving postmodernism’s claims about the decline of aesthetics and dialectical thinking. In fact, despite their obvious differences the three thinkers with which I have engaged in the previous chapters—Rancière, Jameson and Žižek—would agree on this point: that the tension between aesthetics

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

201

and aestheticisation is a dialectical relationship, structuring all contemporary artistic work and experiences. It does not seem to me that this fact could be disproved by the emergence nor the fading of postmodernism. Focusing on this tension, this book has tried to show how the work of Tarantino invites to adopt a dialectical approach and thus suggests that ‘late’ postmodern cinema, broadly conceived, bears out a specific type of interpretation and theoretical attention. By taking a certain detour into film theory, that is, it might be easier to engage with the complexity of the aesthetic, utopian and ideological aspects of contemporary mass culture.

Notes 1. The perspective of this book thus partially overlaps with that adopted by Fabio Vighi in his monograph about film noir and Critical Theory: ‘the disruptive quality of noir can only adequately be rendered by delivering the analysis from the issues of spectatorship in order to bring it to converge, instead, on theorizations of narrative and stylistic representation specific to the cinematic medium. If, as I believe, there is a subversive potential to noir, this should be retrieved via the intervention of a critical thought keen to unravel the cultural artefact the foundational dynamics of its textual organization, which can be ascribed to neither spectatorship nor historical context alone’ (Vighi 2014: 30). 2. In what follows I rely primarily on the of chapter of Men, Women and Chain Saws entitled ‘The Eye of Horror’ (in which Clover develops her broader theoretical framework and, in particular her approach to the notion of ‘female masochism’), as well as on the Introduction, the Afterword and the Preface to the Princeton Classic edition. In this section of the book, Clover further softens her critical stance towards the slasher film, which in her famous essay ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher’ (originally written in 1986, and first published in 1987, in Representations no. 20), was still seen in a largely negative perspective. 3. Linda Williams has praised Clover’s works, explicitly arguing that it helped highlight how Mulvey’s theory was negatively influenced by the fundamental bias of believing in the inevitable association of men and sadism (Williams 1995: 16–17). 4. In Post-Theory, Clover’s work is only mentioned in Cynthia A. Freeland’s chapter ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films.’ Freeland’s treatement of Men, Women and Chain Saws is very ambivalent. First, while it argues that Clover offers insightful readings of the films with which it engages, this argument is used to attack other kind of psychoanalytic approaches that

202

F. PAGELLO

5. 6.

7.

8.

would not pay the same attention to the actual texts. Second, Freeland qualifies Clover’s book as ‘not being from a strictly psychoanalytic framework’ (something which she regards as a positive feature) but at the same time she severely criticizes Clover’s underlying approach to the issue of the representation of gender in popular culture, because it is relies on psychoanalytical framework (202). Thirdly, Freeland emphasizes only specific aspects of Clover’s theory, completely (and bizarrely) ignoring the central concept of ‘female’ masochism. Finally, Freeland regards Clover’s focus on the period of the 1970s and 1980s as the symptom of (psychoanalysis’) lack of interest for historicity. The rest of my chapter will implicitly show how all these comments seem more the result of the fundamental refusal of psychoanalysis by the authors of Post-Theory than an actual engagement with Clover’s work. Cf. ‘Quentin Tarantino on Hitchcock and Brian De Palma.’ The Narrative Art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2zys_rkjwA. July 6, 2020. In Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace’s description of the basic premises of the TV pilot in which she participated bears clear resemblance with those of Kill Bill . In various interviews, Tarantino has claimed that a series of conversations with Thurman during the shooting of Pulp Fiction led him to develop Kill Bill ’s screenplay. In addition to pointing out the very insightful close readings of the film by David Roche (2010, 2018: 118–122), it is interesting to notice how Death Proof was the subject of a screening and a group of presentations given at the round table ‘Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis,’ organised by the Kingston University’s Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London on April 4, 2011. Recordings from the event are available online at the following address: https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/ 2011/04/quentin-tarantino-and-cinemas-other-enjoyment/. Tarantino’s introduction to the book accompanying the release of Grindhouse is quite significant in this context: ‘I’m a huge fan of slasher films of the late ’70, early ’80s. It’s one of my favorite genres and I’ve been falling in love with them all over again recently. And I decided I wanted to do a slasher film. But it’s such a rich genre that everything I thought of doing couldn’t help but come across looking self-reflective. And I wanted to make the movie I would have made if I hadn’t gotten lucky with Reservoir Dogs , getting to make exactly what I wanted to do, artistically, right out of the gate. I always wished I would have had to make like two or three great exploitation movies until I got the chance to make Reservoir Dogs . So now I’m going back. And now I want to make the exploitation movie I would have made if I could have done anything I wanted and at least have it play the grindhouse circuit. So my story, Death Proof, is in

5

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

203

the vein of a slasher film, but instead of the slasher using a knife, he uses a car’ (Tarantino 2007: 8). Tarantino was well aware of this: in his own words, Death Proof ‘fuses the slasher film with high-octane car chase action, which was also a big staple [in 1970s exploitation cinema]. And fuses it so much that they literally– the genres switch hands at some point in the movie. There is some point in the film when you’re not watching what came before. You have actually switched genres now and you’re into a different movie. You’re involved with the characters so you don’t notice it, but you’re actually in a different movie now’ (Volk 2007: 14). On the combination of the two genres, see also Roche (2010, 2018: 118–122). For Roche, in the film goes well beyond the slasher film, finally embracing a queer perspective that mixes masculine and truly feminine attributes in the figures of the second group of girls (2010, 2018: 118–122). Tarantino has discussed the genesis of Inglourious Basterds in many interviews, discussing in detail the long development process of this project. As the same is true for other films by the writer–director, including Kill Bill , this simply means that the links between the different elements in his filmography should not be taken ‘linearly,’ as if each individual film just developed the elements of the immediately previous one or would respond directly to the critical debates relating to it. As highlighted by Oliver Speck and Robert von Dassanowsky, Django’ s Schultz, also interpreted by Christoph Waltz, contains a rather set of sophisticate allusions to German history, politics and philosophy to which the dialogues often refer, even if implicitly (Speck 2013). In The Hateful Eight , the character of Oswaldo Mobray (interpreted by Tim Roth, but originally written by Tarantino for Waltz, who had played Landa and Schultz) makes implicit reference to another crucial moment in European modern philosophy and, particularly, to the German and English Enlightenment: he is presented as British, while his monologue about Law and Frontier justice clearly echoes Kant’s philosophy. On this topic, see several essays included in von Dassanowsky (2012) and Speck (2013), as well as Grosoli (2013). For a thoroughly Hegelian (and Zizekian reading) of Inglourious Basterds . Building on Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism, Roche’s monograph offers solid framework to approach Tarantino’s work as a way commentary of the role of cinema in cultural history (Roche 2018: 5–13). It is interesting to notice here that Tarantino also commented on the use of a large portions of the budget made available to him in relation to the Jack Rabbit Slim’s set constructed for Pulp Fiction (Peary 2013: 58–59; see infra, pp. 118–119). The best discussion of the origins of postmodernism in the 1960s neoavantgarde possibly remains Huyssen (1986).

204

F. PAGELLO

16. The scene in Django Unchained in which Candie is shown to be completely dependent from his (actual) slave Stephen is of course the most overt example of this, but the last exchange between Rick and Cliff in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood also makes the same point absolutely clear (see infra, p. 194). 17. I am referring here to Cliff’s own comment of the events recounted in the flashback focused around his quarrel with Bruce Lee. 18. The interview is currently available on MTV’s YouTube channel at the following address: https://videosift.com/video/Quentin-TarantinoOWNS-Movie-Reviewer-on-Live-TV. July 6, 2020. 19. The interview is available online at the following address: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=V5luBQ3pCXU. July 6, 2020. 20. The interview, recorded at Late Night with Seth Meyers, is now available on the show’s YouTube channel at the following address: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HEd7_7mhg2A. July 6, 2020. 21. See infra, pp. 155, 161 and p. 161.

References Anderson, Aaron C. 2007. Stuntman Mike, Simulation, and Sadism in Death Proof . In Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy, eds. Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad. New York: Open Court. Bianchi, Pietro. 2017. Lacan and Cinema. London: Karnac Books. Bordwell, David. 2011. A Welcome Basterdization. In Minding Movies: Observations of the Art, Craft an Business of Filmmaking, eds. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bordwell, David. 2014. The 1940s Are Over, and Tarantino’s Still Playing with Blocks. Observations of Film Art, July 6, 2020. http://www.davidbord well.net/blog/2014/06/11/the-1940s-are-over-and-tarantinos-still-playingwith-blocks/print/. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll (eds.). 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Brancati, Simona. 2014. Cinema Unchained: The Films of Quentin Tarantino. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. Butter, Michael. 2015. American Basterds: The Deconstruction of World War II Myths in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. In Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary, eds. Sebastian Hermann et alii, 81–99. Heidelberg: Winter. Chrystall, Andrew. 2015. Inglourious Basterds: Satirizing the Spectator and Revealing the ‘Nazi’ Within. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 13 (2): 153–168.

5

SPECTATORSHIP, GENRE AND VIOLENCE

205

Clover, Carol. 2015 (1992). Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire. New York: Verso. Flisfeder, Matthew. 2012. The Symbolic, the Sublime and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freeland, Cynthia A. 1995. Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films. In Posttheory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Grosoli, Marco. 2013. History Is Always Virgin. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Lyotardian Sublime. In Terror and the (Post)Cinematic Sublime, eds. Todd Comer and Isaac Vayo, 88–102. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Haslam, Jason. 2015. Inglourious Criticism, Basterd Fantasies: Rancière, Tarantino, and the Intellectual Spectacle of Hope. In The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope, eds. Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam. Toronto: Toronto University Press. hooks, bells. 1996. Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction. In Reel to Real: Sex, Race, Class at the Movies, ed. Id. London: Routledge. Huyssen, Andrea. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Malavasi, Luca. 2017. Postmoderno e cinema. Roma: Carocci. McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McGowan, Todd. 2015. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game. London: Bloomsbury Academic. McGowan, Todd, and Sheila Kunkle (eds.). 2004. Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: Other Press. Modlesky, Tania. 1988. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Reprinted in Laura Mulvey. 2009. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Peary, Gary. 2013. Quentin Tarantino Interviews: Revised and Updated. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Richardson, Michael D. 2012. Vengeful Violence: Inglourious Basterds, Allohistory, and the Inversion of Victims and Perpetrators. In Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema, ed. Robert Dassanowsky, 93–112. New York: Continuum. Roche, David. 2010. Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007): Subverting Gender Through Genre or Vice Versa?. In Generic Attractions: New Essays

206

F. PAGELLO

on Film Genre Criticism, eds. Maria del Mar Azcona and Celestino Deleyto, 337–353. Paris: Michel Houdiard. Roche, David. 2018. Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Setka, Stella. 2015. Bastardized History: How Inglourious Basterds Breaks through American Screen Memory. Jewish Film & New Media 3 (2) (Fall): 141–169. Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Speck, Oliver C. (ed.). 2013. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and the Continuation of Metacinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2014. The Stakes in Holocaust Representation: On Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Romantic Review 105 (1–2): 73. Tarantino, Quentin. 2007. Introduction by Quentin Tarantino. In Grindhouse: The Sleaze-Filled Saga f an Exploitation Double Feature, ed. Kurt Volkt. New York: Weinstein Books. Uva, Christian. 2009. Grindhouse: A prova di morte. In Quentin Tarantino, ed. Vito Zagarrio, 111–129. Marsilio: Venezia. Volk, Kurt (ed.). 2007. Grindhouse: The Sleaze-Filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature. New York: Weinstein Books. von Dassanowsky, Robert (ed.). 2012. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema. New York: Continuum. Vighi, Fabio. 2014. Critical Theory and Film: Revisting Ideology through Film Noir. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Williams, Linda (ed.). 1995. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Films. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Willis, Sharon. 1995. The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room: Race and Masculinity in the Work of Quentin Tarantino. Camera Obscura 32: 41–73.

Index

A Adorno, Theodor W., 73, 188 Agamben, Giorgio, 188

B Badiou, Alain, 60 Barefoot Contessa, The (Joseph L. Manckiewicz, 1954), 190 Barton Fink (Coen Brothers, 1991), 190 Batman (Tim Burton, 1989), 3 Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 6, 8–10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 24, 40, 61, 66, 69, 71–74, 76, 80, 83, 102, 134, 158, 175 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 3, 24, 92 Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981), 174 Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), 77–79, 104, 120 Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), 17, 103

Booker, M. Keith, 8–11, 15, 16, 66, 69, 76–81, 84, 87, 88, 102, 107–110, 120, 166, 178 Bordwell, David, 2, 7, 8, 11, 18, 25, 26, 51, 110, 122, 132, 157, 158, 161, 167, 170, 171, 186 Botting, Fred, 63, 148 Bourdieu, Pierre, 60 Brancati, Simona, 25, 130, 181 Braudel, Ferdinand, 105, 111 Brooker, Peter, 10, 79, 81, 108, 109, 114, 122, 134 Brooker, Will, 10, 79, 81, 108, 109, 114, 122, 134 Burnham, Clint, 51, 103, 121 Butterfly Effect, The (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004), 108 C Carpenter, John, 100, 120, 175, 181, 182 Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1974), 17, 174 Carroll, Noël, 2, 26, 132, 158, 167, 170, 171

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Pagello, Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43819-7

207

208

INDEX

Clover, Carol, 20, 21, 23, 157, 167–179, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 192, 195, 198, 200–202 Constable, Catherine, 1, 8–11, 15, 16, 18, 69, 76, 79–81, 84, 87, 88, 108–110, 122, 123, 134, 158 Constant Gardener, The (Fernando Mereilles, 2005), 108 Copjec, Joan, 89, 98, 171, 172 Cronenberg, David, 17, 104, 120, 171, 175, 176 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, season 5, episode 24/25 “Grave Danger” (Quentin Tarantino, 2006), 24

D von Dassanowsky, Robert, 203 Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007), 19, 21, 23, 34, 138, 139, 150, 151, 157, 160, 168, 169, 173, 180–187, 195, 202, 203 Debord, Guy, 71–73 Debray, Regis, 36 Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), 198 De Palma, Brian, 17, 18, 21, 34, 59, 120, 152, 159, 171, 174–176, 186, 197, 202 Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012), 19, 23, 25, 121, 131, 138–140, 144, 150–152, 155, 156, 160, 161, 178, 184, 191, 195, 204 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), 102, 103 Dune (David Lynch, 1984), 149

E ER, season 1, episode 24, “Motherhood” (Quentin Tarantino, 1995), 24

F Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), 108 Flisfeder, Matthew, 1, 24–26, 132, 133, 157, 158 From Dusk till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996), 24

G Gallafent, Ed, 18, 25, 51, 63, 115, 120, 146, 160 Godard, Jean-Luc, 35, 46, 48, 59, 114, 152, 174, 197 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 3, 103 Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, 2007), 180, 182, 202 Grosoli, Marco, 188, 203

H Halloween (John Carpenter, 1979), 181 Hall, Stuart, 27 Hateful Eight, The (Quentin Tarantino, 2015), 15, 23, 62, 69, 95–98, 100, 101, 120, 121, 184, 189, 203 Hawks, Howard, 13, 34, 63 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 27, 42, 44, 50, 73, 130, 131, 134–136, 147, 150, 159 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), 63

INDEX

Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 21, 26, 34, 59, 137, 159, 171, 174, 175, 186, 202 Hooper, Tobe, 175 Horkheimer, Max, 188 Hutcheon, Linda, 1, 10–12, 25, 41, 79, 81, 123, 203 Huyssen, Andrea, 61, 203 I Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), 21, 23, 25, 95, 168, 173, 183–189, 191, 195, 203 I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), 167 J Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997), 19, 23, 121, 131, 138, 140, 144–151, 156, 160, 177, 178, 183, 195 Jameson, Fredric, 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15–19, 22, 24–27, 40, 61, 67–91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 102–106, 110, 111, 117–123, 134, 157, 158, 165, 172, 175, 176, 180, 187, 189, 200 Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), 103 Jencks, Charles, 61 K Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 20032004), 9, 11, 19, 21, 23, 34, 78, 80, 127–129, 138, 139, 150, 157, 160, 168, 173, 176–181, 183–186, 195, 198, 202, 203

L Lefebvre, Henri, 73, 85, 86, 119 Leone, Sergio, 32, 34, 91, 128, 186

209

Lynch, David, 17, 26, 77, 104, 120, 122, 136–138, 140, 149, 171, 190 Lyotard, François, 8, 11–13, 16, 36, 41, 60, 61, 69, 71, 74, 79, 103, 134, 188

M Malavasi, Luca, 1, 178 Matrix, The (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), 3, 69 McGowan, Todd, 26, 107–109, 122, 138, 139, 155, 157, 158, 161, 171, 172 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 34 Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), 108 Morsiani, Alberto, 66, 102 Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), 78, 108 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), 77, 190 Mulvey, Laura, 20, 157, 167, 169, 172, 181, 201

N Nama, Adilifu, 51, 156, 161 Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), 24, 108 Negri, Antonio, 109, 122 Nolan, Christopher, 26, 108, 122

O Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), 21, 23, 62, 168, 185, 189–198, 204 P Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007), 180

210

INDEX

Polan, Dana, 8–11, 55, 76, 102, 106, 109, 116, 121, 122, 145, 160, 166, 178 Polanski, Roman, 192, 194 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 174, 186, 187 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), 3, 6, 8–11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 23, 31–34, 54, 63, 66, 67, 70, 76–79, 81, 89, 102, 106–113, 122, 128, 130, 131, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 156, 160, 161, 166, 177, 202, 203

Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986), 104 Sontag, Susan, 10 Speck, Oliver C., 25, 95, 152, 203 Spinoza, Baruch, 109 Star Wars A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), 17, 103 Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), 3 Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), 190

R Raiders of the Ark (1980), 17 Rancière, Jacques, 8, 12–15, 18, 22, 35–52, 58, 60–62, 69–75, 93, 110, 112, 117–119, 121, 158, 165, 188, 199, 200 Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronosky, 2000), 108 Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), 9, 14, 15, 19, 23, 35, 51–54, 59, 63, 66, 69, 78, 89–101, 120, 121, 123, 130, 140–143, 145, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160, 168, 174, 177, 202 Ricoeur, Paul, 105, 106, 111, 121 Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), 192 Run Lola Run (Tom Twyker, 1998), 108

T Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), 17 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (Tobe Hopper, 1974), 167, 193 Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000), 108 True Romance (Tony Scott, 1992), 24

S Sauvage, Célia, 26, 52, 62 Schiller, Friedrich, 36, 42, 44 Scorsese, Martin, 17, 176 Scott, Wilson, 63, 148 Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1950), 189 Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), 17, 174

U Uva, Christian, 181 V Vighi, Fabio, 26, 135, 157, 158, 201 W What Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1967), 190 Wild Buch, The (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), 198 Wrecking Crew, The (Phil Karlson, 1968), 192

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 8, 12, 18–20, 22, 26, 27, 123, 130–139, 145, 146, 149, 150, 157–159, 165, 170–172, 195, 200