Misogynist? Racist? Morally bankrupt?

Now's an appropriate time to go back to Movies as Politics and read Jonathan Rosenbaum's take on Pulp Fiction, written almost exactly nine years ago. He opens by noting the boyishness of Quentin Tarantino, the "couch-potato savant par excellence," the homoerotic undertones ("guys doing guy things with other guys") and devotes about three paragraphs to the celebration of "racial verbal abuse within an elaborately and strategically muddled PC context," with specific reference, of course, to the umpteen times "nigger" is uttered, most often by Tarantino himself.

And then, comes this:

I hasten to add that Pulp Fiction is the most thoroughly and consistently entertaining Hollywood picture I've seen this year, brimming with energy, star power, humor, and ingenuity. It's only when I start to ponder the giddy moral vacuum that produces and validates much of its entertainment - and the dearth of wisdom or vision yielded by these kicks - that my enthusiasm starts to sour.

Takes you back, doesn't it? You can almost feel the buzz again, emerging from the theater after two and a half hours, floating on a big jovial "Mygod, whattamovie!" bubble... and then, sitting over coffee or beer with friends, talking, feeling and almost literally hearing the air hissing out of it all.

And here we are again. For Armond White, Kill Bill is, in short, a "movie that, in the end, simply continues Hollywood's white-supremacist conventions." But he isn't short about it. In his piece at Alternet, which originally ran at Africana.com, White opens with an assertion that goes more than a little over the top: Tarantino kills off Vivica A. Fox's Vernita Green out of revenge - not The Bride's, mind you, but his own, that is, for "the resounding flop of Jackie Brown."

Defending Tarantino and his movies has never been a piece of cake, especially if you are, like me, white, male and a bleeding heart liberal to boot. But some accusations - such as the whole Reservoir Dogs-rips-off-City on Fire thing, usually made by those who quite evidently haven't seen a whole lot of Hong Kong action movies themselves - are easier to wave off than others. And this is certainly one of them. First, Jackie Brown may not have been the runaway box office hit Pulp Fiction was, but it was hardly a flop. Second, the idea that Tarantino somehow learned to never again "take a black person's emotional life seriously" is particularly absurd in the case of Kill Bill, a movie that - and here's where we get to the more worrisome bits, as far as I'm concerned - takes no one's emotional life all that seriously.

In his own hand-wringing piece in the Guardian today, Jonathan Freedland notes that Tarantino "barely fleshes out his main protagonist, offering only a single word of motivation ('revenge'), and fights shy of offering anything so passe as a point, still less a moral." And here, we're in the same territory as White's more serious accusations. Tarantino's films are all a "postmodern" mish-mash, signifiers and fury, signifying nothing:

He's not a black filmmaker the way some have claimed Bill Clinton was a "black" president. Tarantino has simply hoovered-up all the same pop trivia that had been consigned to the poor, urban class and serves it back as a demonstration of the success and approbation that can be had simply by forsaking such issues as social inequality, historically-determined class roles, genuine spirituality and injustice.

For echoes of the same complaint, we can turn first again to Rosenbaum, wrapping up with a reference to "legitimate" parallels others have made between Tarantino and early Godard and...

...the director's determination to cram everything he likes into a movie. But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical; it's like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video-rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide. The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful - namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand.

I admire Rosenbaum as much as anybody (and for that matter, probably White as well), but do we really want to revive notions of high art and low? And does Rosenbaum really mean to imply that Godard, way back there in post-war France, bingeing on Bogart and the rest, was not slumming in Breathless?

Freedland actually does a fine job listing the charges brought against Tarantino (though he doesn't seem to come to a conclusion he's all that comfortable with himself; which is fine. If he's like me, he doesn't go to the movies to be comforted). First, up: misogynist. Now, I haven't seen Kill Bill yet - it opens in Berlin tomorrow, and I'll probably catch it on the weekend - but, as I understand it, the protagonist is a woman. Who, yes, offs Vernita Green, but also carries a swift and mighty sword that fells more than a few men as well. And who sets out on her journey to kill Bill, not Jill.

Racist? Pulp Fiction is indeed all about race, and, as it happens to turn out, it's Samuel L. Jackson's character who achieves enlightenment, albeit an appropriately comic sort of enlightenment, whereas his white counterpart does not and gets blown away.

Moral vacuity? I'll hand the floor to Tarantino himself, talking to Mim Udovitch a few days ago:

In Reservoir Dogs, the last scene in the movie is Tim Roth, lying in Harvey Keitel's arms. The cops are on their way to burst in, and if he shuts his mouth, in 30 seconds he'll be safe. But during those 30 seconds, he tells Harvey Keitel he's a cop. Many people in America and Britain ask why. I could never say, "Well, because he's a man of honor"; I just have to say, "Look, if you don't get it, I can't tell you."

As for all three charges, my final argument would be: Watch Jackie Brown again, a film in which a black woman outsmarts everybody to set right, however temporarily, an immediate universe gone terribly awry. Morally speaking.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2003 9:09 AM