Quentin Tarantino might not just be the defining filmmaker
of our time, but also (hear me out) the single most widely influential artist
in all of contemporary culture. His early features Reservoir Dogs and Pulp
Fiction functioned like homemade explosives, cobbled together from whatever
pop culture cast-offs were at hand, shoved indecorously beneath the floorboards
of the Western artistic tradition. When it detonated, pieces of its deliriously
trashy, self-consciously eclectic and unabashedly violent aesthetic became
embedded everywhere from highbrow theatre to lowbrow broadcasting, Martin
McDonagh to MTV.
More wide-reaching still, the self-styled auteur has
arguably changed the way we watch films, if only inadvertently. His narratives
are typically structured around a series of set-pieces, which almost operate as
self-contained films. When people talk of their favourite Tarantino flick, they
will usually refer not to the episodic stories as a whole, or the often
vividly-drawn characters, but to their favourite scenes. In this way, his early
films appear to have anticipated the arrival of Youtube and its users' montages
of movie moments. They predict the outcome of the digital revolution, which
would facilitate the breaking down of once full-length features into discrete
and quickly digestible units of action and drama. One might therefore say that
he is the pioneering chef of junk food cinema, its delights and irresistible
dangers.
Here are his five greatest creations:
5. True Romance: Sicilian History Lesson
Okay, so this is a bit of a cheat; Tarantino might have
penned the screenplay for this bloody postmodern cut-up of Badlands,
about naive lovers Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette fleeing from
gangsters they've recently robbed, but the film itself was directed by Tony
Scott.
Nevertheless, this
early script helped establish Quentin's name in the industry, and the fatal
encounter between Dennis Hopper's cop Clifford Worley and Christopher
Walken's Sicilian drug overlord Vincenzo Coccotti is one of his most
unforgettable tour-de-forces. Having barged into Worley's trailer with his
hired goons, Coccotti demands that the officer tell him where his son,
Slater, has disappeared with the loot he deems as rightfully belonging to him.
Worley isn't impressed by Coccotti's threats, and realising that he is doomed,
provokes the Sicilian to bloodthirsty rage by delivering an impromptu history
lecture on his people's Moorish ancestry.
Expertly played by
the two veteran character actors, the scene touches on many of the themes that
would come to define Tarantino's work: racism in American society, machismo,
and language as a weapon and precursor to physical violence.
4. Jackie Brown: Get in the trunk
This eight-minute sequence from Tarantino's 1997 ode to the
blaxploitation era of 1970s cinema is a superb piece of filmmaking. There are
the usual verbal pyrotechnics, but presented with an uncharacteristic restraint
and subtlety.
Samuel L Jackson's
black-market gun runner Ordell Robbie shows up uninvited at the home of
Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker), a criminal employee he has recently bailed
out of jail and whom he fears may turn informant against him. On the pretext of
doing him a favour, Ordell coaxes Beaumont out of his living room, into the
trunk of his car, and off to an unceremonious demise.
The brilliance of
the scene lies in the performances: For once, Tucker can do his motor-mouth
schtick without outstaying his welcome, and Jackson demonstrates his uncanny
facility with Tarantino's words, seducing Beaumont and us, the audience, who
laugh along with the ghetto banter so that the final moments of brutality
register as a real shock.
3. Reservoir Dogs: The Diner
Never one to rush proceedings, Tarantino opens his debut
with nearly ten minutes of totally irrelevant yet utterly compelling dialogue
between the titular colour-coded crooks. They chew the fat about everything
from Madonna to the ethics of tipping, over coffee and cigarettes. Even the man
himself gets in on the action, in role as Mr Brown, giving his eccentric take
on the lyrics of 'Like A Virgin'. And why not? After all, Tarantino's dialogue
is usually just a means of engaging in flirtatious conversation with his
audience, and here he simply bypasses the middle-man of the professional actor
and does it straight to the camera.
In this scene, we
see that Tarantino tipped his hat to Godard early, outright stealing the New
Wave pioneer's hip, narrative-averse riffing on pop culture, and replacing
Gallic sophistication with all-American brashness.
2. Inglourious Basterds: Hans Landa Smells A Rat
If Tarantino can be said to have 'matured' as an artist at
all over the two decades of his career, one might locate this change in his
recent willingness to engage with the real world, specifically historical
traumas of great significance in the formation of America, albeit heavily
filtered through his own pulp mill of fantasy and dime-store fiction.
Case in point: the
opening scene of his controversial WW2 revenge drama. Colonel Hans Landa,
notorious 'Jew Hunter' of the SS and perhaps the single most memorable
character Tarantino has created, arrives at a French farmhouse in order to
interrogate dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite, whom he secretly suspects of
harbouring Jewish refugees.
Unlike the detached
thrills of his earlier work, Tarantino's direction allows a truly authentic
sense of horror to bleed through the celluloid - this time, we feel the
magnitude of what is at stake. Later on, the film dispenses with this emotional
weight as it moves towards audaciously-staged comic-book levity, but for a
little while at least Tarantino rivals the depiction of inhuman cruelty and
prejudice evident in the best parts of Spielberg's Schindler's List.
1. Pulp Fiction: Tasty burgers and dead meat
Black screen. Cut to Jules Winnfield (Samuel L Jackson) and
Vincent Vega (John Travolta), immaculately attired, speeding down a Los Angeles
motorway, en route to another job. These two men are killers, but you might
be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
They yak about cheese burgers and Amsterdam. They alight, tooling up
with firearms, and scaling a nondescript apartment block. They're still
talking, but now they're on to foot massages...Stay alert - some of these
topics might make a reappearance later on. In Tarantino's universe, words are
like a rogues gallery in a whodunit: there are plenty of them, and you never
know which ones to suspect.
Jules and Vince
burst in on a trio of gormless college kids - former business partners of their
boss, Marcellus Wallace. It seems they tried to put one over on him. The
details are never explained. In Tarantino, these familiar genre tropes rarely
are, in any more than half-hearted fashion. Come on, the films say, we all know
the score, so let's just get to the good stuff. First, the passing of judgment.
And then the execution.
Before he finally
pops a cap in their ass, and having already seemingly exhausted his supply of
quoteworthy dialogue, Jules delivers a passage from the Bible: Ezekiel 25:17.
It's the ultimate postmodern repurposing, showing that - quite literally - no
text is sacred any more.
It's the
quintessential Tarantino sequence because it encapsulates what all of his films
reflect about the nihilistic maelstrom that is the modern world, and what they
have perhaps helped turn it into. It is a window into a universe where meaning is
no sooner found than it is lost, a fallen Eden and a garden of earthly
delights, exhilarating and disturbing. Tarantino's very own Youtube.
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