The Un-Review

Why I’m not going to go see Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.

Back in 1994, well before the internet catapulted spoilers at the world, indiscriminately, I heard that the film Pulp Fiction was worth seeing. I took my then-girlfriend (who is now my wife) based on the recommendation of some friends. I had seen Reservoir Dogs some years before and had admired the technical facility and flair of the direction but thought the violence slightly more than gratuitous. Pulp Fiction, I thought, turned out to be even more brutal in a way that left me very very uneasy. We ended up walking out of the film well before the halfway mark. It was just too uncomfortable. Years later I sat through a full view when it was on cable. Seeing the entire film did not change my opinion of it. This is, perhaps, a strange comment on Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood because I am certain I will not go see it. Oh, I might view it, in years to come when it’s on Netflix or HBO and I don’t have to pay for it. But I’m not going to make an effort to see the film because I think I know what’s going to happen. I know it’s going to make me uneasy in the same way as Pulp Fiction, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight all made me uneasy. I don’t much like what I feel are Quentin Tarantino’s efforts to make me complicit in his sulfurous cruelty and his depictions of violence.

It is not that I have any direct objection to the depictions of violence in films. If you ask me to compile a list of the best movies — movies you must see — such a list will include many truly violent films. Some of the best directors living are far more violent than Tarantino. Francis Ford Coppola made the first two Godfather films as well as Apocalypse Now, which I would categorize as one of the most violent films ever. I will tell you that, despite his cuddly reputation, Steven Spielberg can be one violent director: you must see the exquisitely painful Schindlers List, the flawed flesh rending Amistad and the conflicted moral chaos and physical violence that is Munich. I will tell you that David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is a superb film but that his masterwork is the brutalist Eastern Promises. Of course, growing up with the Dirty Harry franchise and The Outlaw Josey Wales, I was already a fan of Clint Eastwood, but I stand in awe of Unforgiven.

It’s not the simple presence of violence, in a Tarantino film, which I find distasteful, it’s the manner of contextualizing and manipulation that invites complicity in the violence and in the cruelty. In Peter Weir’s film 1983 Witness — a film about witnessing violence, one that is also on my list of must-see films — a young Amish boy, the 8-year-old Lukas Haas, is fascinated with the handgun brought into his home by the cop, played by Harrison Ford. Confronted by his grandfather who asks him, ‘You would use this gun of the hand? Would you kill another man?’ To which the boy responds, ‘I would only kill the bad man.’ Thus is depicted the transactional morality of an eight-year-old boy and where we must begin a discussion of Tarantino’s depiction of violence.

He would shoot only the bad people.

He further invites our complicity in the violent deed — indeed, our cheerful rejoicing — by manipulating and revising our collective guilts, self-righteous fantasies and cultural and historical bogeymen. In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino will depict a Jew with agency, but only so far as that agency involves beating German soldiers to brutal death with a baseball bat. If you got to club someone, make that someone a Nazi. One is left with a sickening sense of a moral bribe: Tarantino gets to depict cruelty and vivid physical suffering after taking pains to architect some form of moral narrative around the act; the audience wants the moral narrative but one gets the feeling that Tarantino might just want to get off on the act of violence. The same dynamic is on display in Pulp Fiction and I didn’t buy it then. Inglorious Basterds proved to me that Quentin Tarantino didn’t grow up, hadn’t changed. Later, in Basterds, an entire theatre is laid waste in a chaos of fire and bullets, but the audience is invited to cheer this conflagration because Adolf Hitler and Herman Goebbels were in that building and the film was Nazi propaganda anyways. Let a modern-day Sampson light the match and the audience approves bringing down the temple on modern-day Philistines in vivid technicolor detail. The same dynamic is manipulated in Django Unchained, where the righteous fantasia of an escaped black man is juxtaposed with vile slavers and, you guessed it, the slavers die, some of them gruesomely. Hoorah for the violent death of slavers. And again, in The Hateful Eight, an elderly Confederate General is gunned down by a black man after first having been taunted with a tale — gratuitously depicted with voiceover — of how the same black man humiliated, tortured and killed the General’s bounty hunter son. Yee-ha for the death of Confederate Generals and the cruel dispatching of their offspring.

The violence in a Tarantino film is calculated and transactional: the audience’s approval for an aesthetic of cruelty if their moral sense is fellated. It makes me ill.

I never finished the scene from Witness. After the grandfather asks the boy about the gun and the boy says, “I would only kill the bad man.”

Eli Lapp: Only the bad man. I see. And you know these bad men by sight? You are able to look into their hearts and see this badness? Samuel Lapp: I can see what they do. I have seen it. Eli Lapp: And having seen you become one of them? Don’t you understand? What you take into your hands, you take into your heart.

By this point you are, no doubt, wondering why I’ve sat through these movies, the violence of which I profess to detest, and if there is some prurience here to which I should cop. It’s very simple: Tarantino is so very good at storytelling and directing his actors that he simply can not be ignored. But a well-directed snuff film with stellar production values and great acting is still a snuff film. But Tarantino is now so prominent and influential that others are copying his style.

I guess I keep hoping that his gigantic talent will someday overwhelm his moral poverty. I watched The Hateful Eight against my better judgment and liked much of the first two thirds of the movie. Yeah, the casual cruelty was there, as always, but it simmered in the background and, for a little while, it seemed he might be on the edge of actually wrestling with it, grappling with the implications of it and that he might end up saying something worth saying. It may have turned out to be as magnificent as Apocalypse Now. No such luck. Instead, the cruelty ratcheted up, moving from casual to intense as the plot went from clean articulation to incoherence and before too long nearly everyone dies in a drenching bloodbath. The last third or so of the film is just a collection of gaping wounds in dialogue. Yuck.

I especially admire Tarantino’s talent with actors. Christoph Waltz is an amazing actor — I would watch Waltz watch other people read the phone book — and his Hans Landa is the best thing about Inglorious Basterds: a crafty suavity barely concealing an unclean menace and cruelty. The best thing I can say about Waltz is that he reminds me of the finest ever, the young Jimmy Cagney: the Cagney of Public Enemy, White Heat, and my personal all-time favorite Angels with Dirty Faces; Cagney was always on the balls of his feet, leaning into it with his whole body and always adding an electric kinetics atop a barely contained ferocity. Waltz has that, too. And Tarantino has the talent to recognize it…

The film that gave me this hope that Tarantino could transcend whatever interior cruelty exists is one he wrote but didn’t direct, True Romance. Directed by the late Tony Scott it has some of the same elements as all Tarantinos others but in Scotts’ more humane handling there is drawn from the script an ambivalent engagement with the violence: the actors bite into the roles and explore them, rather than display them and there is little overt manipulation. The well-known scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper is a master class in acting, atmosphere and nuance. That, I guess, is what I want more of. On the other hand, in the same film, Gary Oldmans hambone pimp is an object lesson on the perils of fearlessness.

It is just the peril of this kind of fearlessness, I think, to which Tarantino has fallen prey. He is a power, now, in Hollywood. He can command scripts and film what he wants and perhaps there is nobody with the moral imagination or even the simple balls to tell him no, else The Hateful Eight might have ended as well as it began. Based upon what I have heard, I don’t have much hope for such growth in the new film, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. So I’m going to skip it.