Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009).
My first memory of watching a movie in a theater was when I was seven, and it was a double bill: Peter Pan and Kill Bill: Vol. 2.
Whenever my divorced father came to visit me, he would always bring me to the movies. He had wanted to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2 on its opening-weekend release, April 16, 2004. This meant I’d be watching the former by myself. This was our little ritual: we’d pay for one, we’d sneak into another movie, then he’d drop me home with my mother.
Peter Pan—which was released on Christmas 2003, and which the Regency Commerce, the local cineplex in East Los Angeles where I’d frequently watch films in Spanish dubs, had held over for nearly four months after the holiday season—looked like a safe enough kids’ movie to my father. Surely I’d be kept rapt for the two hours and change.
What neither my dad nor I banked on was the following: that weekend, the Regency Commerce was reviving Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 as a sort of prelude to the just-released Kill Bill: Vol. 2 for those who missed its first theatrical release, or had simply forgotten the plot.
So as I watched Peter Pan, my father, who liked the first Kill Bill, decided to watch both Volumes 1 and 2, which played in the same theater. Just for the hell of it.
I don’t remember him telling me this was going to be his plan.
When Peter Pan ended, I came outside to the lobby and didn’t see him come out of the Kill Bill theater. I was confused. I must have waited for 20 minutes. Then I realized, Oh. He must still be watching his movie. Naturally, then, I walked into the Kill Bill theater.
I saw my father at his usual spot: aisle seat, third row from the back. But then my attention turned towards the screen: pitch dark. Suddenly, a flashlight turned on. Held by a woman. And she was stuck in some tight enclosed space. I looked on. It was a coffin. She was buried alive. She grunted and screamed and smacked the top of the coffin but she couldn’t get out. Suddenly I started to hyperventilate. Panicked, I hated what I was looking at. I left the cinema in a rush, leaving my dad to finish the rest of the movie without me. I didn’t go into another theater for the remainder of the running time. When my dad came out, I don’t think I said much. To this day, I think my claustrophobia stems from that image of Uma Thurman’s Bride in the coffin.
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (Tarantino, 2004).
Why am I starting this piece—ostensibly a piece on Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino’s brash, sloppy, annoying, yet never-uninteresting new book of film criticism-cum-memoir—with this memory? Maybe because the book Tarantino has written invites such recollections, such trips down movie-memory-lane. But there’s a larger personal stake: it’s a book that forces me to confront the psychology and the unvarnished thoughts of a movie-maker who has loomed incredibly large in my cinematic education, a man with whose work I’ve had the most manic relationship, one of push-pull (mostly pullaway) and of love-hate (mostly an exasperatedly entertained contempt). And like it or not, Tarantino’s images are here to stay. They have heft. They’ve entered the unconscious. They’ve something to say about how the image has been bastardized, and how it might replenish, in the coming years of this still-strange third century of cinema. They are the peak of extreme violence, yet the pain represented has no lash or linger; as Abbas Kiarostami once noted, “Since violence will never leave the American film, an important thing Tarantino has done is to find a way to at least make fun of violence, and that brings down the tension of violence.” The images are beguiling, maddeningly unforgettable: the bleeding swastika on a screaming Nazi’s head, the squishy and pornographic instant-replay murders of three hot chicks at the hands of Kurt Russell’s car, the twist on the dance floor of a depressingly nostalgic diner, a hate fellate.
Like his films, Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation gives one the beautiful impression of a period—but is it truly there? Or is it in a state of suspended floating, as illusory as those fabled twenty-four frames? Is it mere cherry-picking of scenes that conform to what he wants the ’60s to be, like Joan Didion cherry-picking scary Manson stories to tell in the dark in The White Album, and voilà: instant end-of-the-’60s, end of radicalism, end of history, end of good times and all that tired blah blah?
The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972).
Cinema Speculation wants to be hip film criticism, a screenplay, a chatty autobiography, a bildungsroman, and a casual movie history delivered off the top of the head all at once. Beyond the timeline of Tarantino’s childhood watching films in the 1970s, there is no rhyme or reason to the films covered. He narrates watching the Jim Brown film Black Gunn (1972) on opening weekend with a theater full of Black moviegoers, an event that looms large in Tarantino’s legend. He talks of watching, at age nine, John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), whose infamous rape sequence with Ned Beatty will carry over into the just-as-infamous Marcellus Wallace/Gimp sequence in Pulp Fiction (1994). He defends Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller (1974), raves about Rolling Thunder (1977), argues the best Donald Westlake/Parker adaptation is not Point Blank (1967, which Tarantino rather flamboyantly hates) but The Outfit (1973), and notes what (to him) went right and wrong with Sam Peckinpah’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway (1972) with Ali MacGray and Steve McQueen. McQueen in particular takes up a lot of mental space for Tarantino, as he contemplates the ebbs and flows of his career, rightly crediting his then-wife Neile Adams for being the driving force to the actor’s stardom, picking and choosing for Steve which scripts he would read.
If anything I say sounds remotely “attack”-y, rest assured that it comes from a place of a weird admiration, a wicked love, a literal lifetime of having looked deeply and closely—sometimes against my conscious will, as attested to by all those TNT/AMC showings of Inglourious Basterds (2009) on commercial-filled TV—at Tarantino as a public figure, a phenomenon, a certain tendency of US cinema. He’s an artist who blankly provokes and riles up the masses, never quite “loving” them in the Chaplin sense, nor “loathing” them in the Hitchcock sense. Tarantino is a historically necessary antithesis to a lot of the things I tend to go for in cinema, yet (as parts of Cinema Speculation hint at, as large swaths of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [2019] and all of Jackie Brown [1997] show), he is also, damn him!, a fellow melancholic drifter-dreamer. Tarantino’s screenwriting can make me guffaw like Preston Sturges does: “Jules, you give that fuckin' nimrod 1500 dollars and I'll shoot him on general principle.” Or: they can have that raw unvarnished pulp poetry that he takes from the novels of Elmore Leonard, David Goodis, or Jim Thompson: “Your ass used to be beautiful,” in Jackie Brown, or that film’s final blurring-of-the-camera on Robert Forster that nails the anguish of an arrested, teary love.
If Cinema Speculation would have had a better life as 2 a.m. pub ramblings from a talkative East Village movie freak, and not a fancy hardcover with a really nice jacket jonesing to be bought 50 percent off at the Santa Monica Grove’s Barnes and Noble, that’s by design. I’ve a feeling Tarantino knows this. He loves the disposable-made-artily-significant. We see that not only in the release of his cheap paperback novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but also in a telling anecdote that appears early in the book. Little Quint’s mother tells him, at age seven, that she doesn’t like showing him pictures which have “violence for violence’s sake.” That day, a star-maker was born. For lo: Tarantino saw that he would not make pictures that were just violence for violence’s sake. The violence would have stakes: aesthetically (all those quotations in Kill Bill of Seijun Suzuki and other mid-century Japanese CinemaScope gun-battles done in a slam-bang Pop Art style) or on-the-surface politically (the historical revisionist trilogy of Basterds-Django-Hollywood). Tarantino’s book is only a footnote to his real métier of increasingly moral motion-picture-makin’, but it’s a revealing footnote, one that provides the crude fodder for psychoanalysis of its author. Let me clarify: Tarantino as a person isn’t particularly interesting. It’s his work, what the signifier of “Tarantino” has done to modern U.S. and global pop culture, and what his mythologization through the cinema has wreaked in terms of a whole movie generation’s new relationship with the image.
Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977).
Referentiality is cemented in Cinema Speculation, as in all of Tarantino’s work, as the only aesthetic strategy. The book is practically unreadable for a general audience who might know the Zed’s Dead scene from Pulp Fiction but knows next to nothing about Charles Bronson, the Isaac Hayes soundtrack to Tough Guys (1974), Donald Westlake, Rolling Thunder, the term “Movie Brat,” or any of the circa 2,598 proper nouns that litter this ungainly brick of a memoir. And after I had circled and noted so many of the films Tarantino disparages that I fiercely love (Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black [whose low-key, human-scaled Hitchcockian riffing I now prefer to the obvious pop of Kill Bill], Altman’s Brewster McCloud, Boorman’s Point Blank, Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the ending to Paul Schrader’s Hardcore), I thought to myself, dispirited, Oh, why should I care about his opinions. The point, I guess, is to accept Tarantino as not just a film geek—he’s the film geek. (Scorsese is Film, plain and simple, no geekery.) He knows his shit. He won the Oscars to prove it. He’s got the fancy movie theater. The clout. The rep. (Pretty clean despite those deals with les frères Weinstein.) And he talks a mad game.
Like this piece, Tarantino’s book starts off with a defining double bill for seven-year-old Quint: Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa and John G Avildsen’s Joe (both 1970). It’s interesting to read that even at an early age, Tarantino was nascently aware (he claims) of the power of the mass theatrical audience to make or break a film. He’s practically breathless—pun intended—when he remembers the peals of laughter that would greet all of Peter Boyle’s line readings as hippie-hating Joe the Factory Worker. This, to Tarantino, is the ultimate goal of movies: get that reaction, give the people something they’ll never forget, leave them happy, feed all the secret desires of every single one of those suckers who paid good money to see tits and ass, katana gashes and aorta gushes in the bad guy’s chest a mile wide, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh. He’s the best in Hollywood, in that regard. It’s similar to the addiction to the public described so memorably by Chaplin’s Calvero in Limelight (1952): “Very sad if they won't laugh. But it's a thrill when they do. To look out there and see them all laughing, to hear that roar go up, waves of laughter coming at you.” But a little later, when pressed by Claire Bloom’s ballerina, Calvero shrinks back from the public responsible for that laughter: “There's greatness in everyone. But as a crowd, the public is like a monster without a head that never knows which way it's going to turn. It can be prodded in any direction.” Tarantino, posterboy of the US postmoderns, is the King of Prodding. And his prods, he claims, have no one to report back to but their own prodding. “Because it’s so much fun, Jaaaan!”
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009).
Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Tarantino’s other alt-history films Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained (2012), Cinema Speculation serves not just as the historical wish-fulfillment suggested by the title (i.e.: “What if I, via the version of Brian De Palma in my head, directed Taxi Driver in 1976 and not Martin Scorsese, who fumbled the end?”), but also as an extended nostalgia trip. Tarantino lives once again through his kid glory days at the greatest time for movies, which is the slick propaganda that he has dutifully swallowed from Pauline Kael who persistently thought that the 1970s (that’s to say, Hollywood and a few token “foreign” imports: a Satyajit Ray here, a Truffaut there, some Hong Kong actioners) were the greatest period in the history of cinema, simply because she was living through them as both critical New Yorker chronicler of the times and historical subject conscious of her historicity. Tarantino, recalling Kael, gloats about how sophisticated he looked to his schoolyard friends because he was getting to watch what he deems cinema’s peak, the “New Hollywood,” while they were stuck watching presumably Don Knotts comedies, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and the horrors of Hanna-Barbera animation.
In some ways, one can read Cinema Speculation as an addendum to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s most beguiling feature, and the first work of his in over two decades that’s approached the sensitivity, embittered romance, and mature glory that was promised by his best, Jackie Brown. It seems written through with the same nostalgic glow as the book, the same desire to go back to childhood and see what formed the blood-and-guts-obsessed man who has become synonymous with Bankable Auteur Name, even more than Steven “PG-13” Spielberg. Tarantino is the forbidden. He’s seen the worst of humanity (but only a movie version of humanity), and he’s advertised his films as culturally-savvy spectacles of cool-smart-hip guts and gore. And he corrects all of history’s wrongs. The Jews machine-gun Hitler’s face to a squibby pulp. Django the slave frees himself, and burns down the plantation along the way. Sharon Tate’s next-door neighbors save her from her diabolical fate by charbroiling the dumb hippie menace freaks, and their reward is entrance into the fairy-princess’s castle itself: the house of Roman Polanski. We know what really happened. (Some of us.) But hey: at least in Hollywood, we can dream another dream, think up a better image, so that we don’t have to think of all the bad scary mean nastinesses of that thing called History.
In one of Cinema Speculation’s more pointless chapters, Tarantino tries to imagine how he would have done the Taxi Driver ending. His gripe is that Scorsese compromised with white Columbia Picture studio heads by switching out the race of the pimp Sport. Initially written as Black by Schrader, the studios objected to the ostensible stereotype, Scorsese agreed, and cast stalwart member of the Scorsese Stock Company Harvey Keitel instead. For whatever reason, Tarantino rages for pages on what he perceives as the censorial cowardice of this switch-up—which, I must say, doesn’t really change the sinister mechanics of the film as dramatically as he claims. Travis is still suggested and coded as a repentant racist, not just due to the subtextual references to The Searchers and the Comanche-hating Ethan Edwards, but also in the way Scorsese directs De Niro to glance or stare at anyone who’s not white in the city. Just because it doesn’t say it out loud doesn’t mean it’s not there. Meanwhile, we can say that one of the most egregious structural and political flaws of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has to do with what critic Neil Bahadur has insightfully pointed out as the film’s erasure of the Manson Family’s racism, and how their entire motives were predicated upon the desire to make the Tate/LaBianca murders look as if Black people had committed them. If Tarantino chews out Scorsese for not confronting racism far enough, then we can chew Tarantino out for ignoring it entirely.
To read someone’s memories of what they watched at the movies is not, in and of itself, particularly interesting. It’s akin to reading someone’s dreams. Their particular interpretation of the cinema they watch has a specific meaning to the dreamer that would take a lifetime to unravel, but that isn’t of immediate interest to you. You may enjoy the company of the watcher-dreamer, but after a while you might think, as I did, “Well, Jesus, what else is there for him besides just movies?”
I realized while reading Cinema Speculation that most of my cinephilic life—which too is of no interest—is not rooted in a place, in a theater. My cinephilia developed in quieter, unpeopled chambers: my own bedroom, a small TV, a stream of Criterion Collection DVDs checked out from the library, whatever Netflix DVDs would come to my house. Perhaps that’s just the calmer nature of post-’70s cinephilia today: the silent erratic router, the late-night laptop glow, the conversations online with people whose faces you’ve never seen. Neither my nor Tarantino’s way is better, neither is worse: score one for postmodernity. Constant unmoorings. We’re not getting an eccentric (Peckinpah) adapting another eccentric (Jim Thompson) and having the result be a top-ten box-office hit of the year anytime soon. Now: Image begets image. And then another image, and another, rinse and nihilistically repeat.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Tarantino, 2019).