The Genre Redefining Films of Quentin Tarantino
By Nicky Nocerino
There are very few who would disagree with the statement that Quentin Tarantino is one of the great contemporary directors, he has been nominated for 5 Oscars, 2 of which he won, has directed 16 movies, written for 7 others, and has been an active part of the film industry since 1992. As would be expected from someone who has worked on so many films, there is a lot of variety in his work, but there is one theme that seems to be present in a large quantity of these is the use of usually consider "low Brow" genres to create films with considerably more artistic substance. Four four films where this is most prevalent are
Inglorious Bastards,
Kill Bill (Part 1 and 2), and
Django: Unchained. These films take genre tropes from Spaghetti Westerns, Kung-Fu Films, and even Jew revenge films(yes this actually was a B-movie sub genre for a short time) and use them to make movies with rich dialogue, original narratives, and complex characters.
Spaghetti Westerns:
One of the oldest film genres, dating back to 1903 with
The Great Train Robbery, is the western. The Spaghetti Western (named after it's popularity in Italy) is an offshoot of the western, that focus on extreme violence and action, and usually have morally corrupt or selfish motivations. Probably the best example of this type of movie among Tarantino's work is
Kill Bill (especially part 2). This film follows a character known only as "the Bride" on here quest to avenge the murder of her fiance and attempted murder of her by hunting down the killer , Bill, and his crew of highly trained killers. This already falls into one of the classic Western Story types, the revenge film, and uses the ground work to ascend the genre. The first way he does this is with the character of the bride, usually in a spaghetti western the hero would be the man with no name and a mysterious past on his journey for revenge, someone who is fun to watch, but all in all has no real character to speak of. Tarantino starts to break this right from the get go by making the main character, usually a macho brooding figure, a woman, something unheard of in a spaghetti western. He keeps the details of the betray secret for the entire first film to build the mystery, but shows it to us later, along with the rest of her back story to show her motivation and even justify here actions. This all works in tangent with excellent dialogue to slowly replace the shallow stereotypical "man with no name" into a character with complex motivations. In fact, Tarantino even takes time to poke fun at the "man with no name" character by literally bleeping out the characters name in the first movie, and then in the second movie having Bill call the bride "kiddo" which the audience thinks is a nickname, but turns out to be the Bride's last name. This not only puts the trope on it's head it also changes the context of several prior scenes by revealing that the closeness implied by him calling her by a nickname was not only false, but also that he opposite was implied by Bill referring to her by her last name. All of this serves to take the best that Spaghetti Westerns had to offer, and fill the cracks with character never seen in this genre before.
Another big part of the Spaghetti Westerns is the extreme violence. While entertaining, this would often lack a sense of weight that could be found in other genres due to it's overall lack of meaning. violence was portrayed as so common place that it would lose much its meaning. In
Django: Unchained however Tarantino uses the story, characters and setting to give meaning to the violence. In this movie Django is a cowboy who is also a former slave, which would certainly give justification to his violence in the eyes of the audience, and Django needs to free his slave wife, which gives him a reason to use violence, but this film goes one step farther and uses it's violence to say something. The majority of people Django kills are slavers and criminals, with one interesting exception, Steven the head house slave. Once the more conventional eccentric villain Calvin Candie is dead, Steven a much more cold calculating man steps forth as the main villain. This serves to answer the question posed earlier in the movie as to why the slaves don't just kill the masters, because the slaves were made to believe believe in the institution even more than the owner. We see many scenes were Steven acts far more racist towards Django than any of the whites do, because he has been made to hate his own race and by extension himself. When Candie was shot it was just one man dead, it didn't really change anything, but when Steven and what he represented was killed, the entire plantation was destroyed with him. This give the violence meaning, and by doing this Tarantino brought this film above the problems of its genre.
Jew Revenge Films:
In the early to mid 2000's a small sub genre of WWII action movies mostly known as Jew revenge flicks began to emerge. Movies like
Black Book and
Defiance centering around either one or several Jewish refugees slaughtering Nazi soldiers and saving the day (or at least surviving), and usually contain heavy violence and a reasonable amount of gore to really hammer in the whole revenge part. Tarantino's movie
Inglorious Bastards takes this and turns it up to 11. The violence is over the top, the revenge is brought up to scalping levels, the Nazis are some how even more evil than usual, and even the recipient of the revenge is amped up to Hitler himself. This is not, however, the focus of the movie, the focus is instead some thing that never really took the forefront in jew revenge flicks until now, the dialogue.
In Bastards there is one action that gets more screen time than anything else, talking. While every film will usually have a lot of talking, to focus on it so much in what is extensively an action movie certainly is strange. An example of this can be seen in the bar scene, when the bastards are waiting to meet up with a contact undercover, and end up sharing a table with a Nazi commander who slowly figures out who they are throughout their conversation and ends up in an incredibly tense stand off. This breaks out into an extremely violent action scene, but that only lasts a few brief moments and only serves to emphisize the considerably longer and more memorable time spent talking. In fact, this scene would have been boring without the talking, because the tension and atmosphere would have been non existent. The dialogue wasn't just used for tension though, it also took on a large role of creating characterization. We only ever see The Jew Hunter, the main villain, kill a few jews. He doesn't kill them personally, and doesn't even seem to take to much enjoyment from the killing itself, but through his dialogue and interactions with the other characters we can see what a cold manipulative bastard he is. The same goes for the main hero, he kills plenty of Nazis, but his men kill more, it is his down right, for lack of a better word, americanness in the way he talks and gets things done that makes him the good guy when put against his foil, The Jew Hunter. By putting in this amazing dialogue, Tarantino brought a whole new level to this sub genre that few had even noticed was missing.
Kung-Fu Movies
Becoming popular in the 1970's and never really losing said popularity entirely, the Martial arts movie is a big piece of film history. Using eastern aesthetic styles and fighting styles, these movies are known to thrive on spectacle and action, and are known for there huge and impossible fight scenes using a style known a wire-fu (a type of fighting where the actors are on wires allowing them to fight unrestricted by gravity). While quite a few of Tarantino's movies draw from this genre in some small ways,
Kill Bill(more so part 1) draws the most. Much of what I said about the characters in my western portion also applies here, but there is also a change from the more eastern style of this genre evident in this movie that provides some interesting changes.
While a Traditional Martial arts movie would usually take place in a more ancient eastern location, such as ancient china or feudal japan,
Kill Bill takes place in a More modern setting and mostly in the west. This is not unheard of, in fact the actor who played Bill was the star of
Kung-Fu, which had a similar premise, and clearly had some influence in the making of
Kill Bill. The thing that really sets this movie apart is that it holds onto realism, and retains a distinctly modern and occasionally american feel. Many Scenes hold the old eastern feel, but those usually take place in flash backs with the exception of when the bride is receiving her new sword. The old eastern parts acts as the set up, while the story takes place in the here and know, giving this movie more of a feeling of realism and helps make the characters more realistic. Speaking of realism, this movie tends to avoid the more mystical and impossible pieces of martial arts that are common in Kung-Fu movies and instead focus on respect, strength, and discipline as what gives the main character her power. Even the fight scenes stay within these bounds, sure they are ridiculous and over the top, but the feats of the main character still remain in the scope of possible, even if they are unlikely. When fighting the crazy 88, the bride does not use wire-fu or any other impossible moves, she tries to fight as few at one as possible and picks them of several at a time until she is all that is left. All of this helps the audience relate to the character, she does not have special powers, she runs of of things we all can understand, anger and determination. All of these serve to make the bride a character we can relate to, instead of a generic 2 dimensional one.
Conclusion:
Across all of these movies and genres we can see several similarities in how Tarantino makes his movies. He is obviously a big fan of pulp entertainment and has a lot of love for the genres he is working in, but he also knows that they have their flaws, Spaghetti westerns have great action and atmosphere, but their characters are often generic an uninteresting. Tarantino is an incredibly talented writer and he knows how to do dialogue and create great characters, and the types of movies he likes to make were never very strong in that department. He is good enough where he would be successful not matter what type of movies he made, but because he has such a love for the genres that needed what he had the most, he was not only able to make some great things, but he was able bring entire genres that were previously considered shear entertainment under the lens of art, which will not only allow his work to shine, but also that which was previously brushed aside.
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