After a minor detour to the u-topos of theory, I return our conversation to the shifty territory of violence and film, and no name indexes the intersection of violence and film more eloquently than Tarantino.
The last post on violence and/in Tarantino offered a detailed reading of two scenes in Kill Bill. I would like to continue some thoughts that began to take form in that post, in addition to extending the discussion to Reservoir Dog, which remains, in my view, pure cinematic genius.
In Kill Bill the rhythmic and speed alteration from sequence to sequence is commonly expressed by the way the camera gaze pans and cuts. The uneven rhythm injects some degree of tension in a long sequence that otherwise remains utterly predictably. No one doubts that Thurman’s character, the master narrator in the movie thus far, will not perish imminently.
Moreover, the way rhythmic speed fluctuates within the same sequence points to the central space that time occupies both formally and thematically in most of Tarantino’s films, especially in Kill Bill. In “Childhood Living: James and Tarantino” Patrick O’Donnell argues that time is Kill Bill’s main theme: “Kill Bill is a film about wasting time, the wasting away of temporality, the time of wasting bodies, landscapes, cinematic repertories” (CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, N. 2, Fall 2009, 2). The excess that has come to characterize Tarantino’s overall style, particularly of his action-driven scenes of violence, goes hand in hand with the structure of waste that pervades his films, thematically and formally.
The stylization of violence, at least as it is executed in Tarantino’s films, not only presents violence within identifiable aesthetic norms (e.g. animation, farce), but also codifies it to circumscribe its possible repercussions to a deliberately limited frame. O’Donnell notes that in the Kill Bill films excess remains a central formal operation, frequently “backtracking and hypercitational excess” (4), through which theme and narrative become inhered in the structure of the films. In Tarantino, both style and script tend to exceed any standard of necessity.
Contrary to the accusation that some critics level against Tarantinesque violence (in that it beautifies, eroticizes, even glorifies it), the careful stylization that configures these scenes does not attempt to amplify the aesthetic and even affective impressions that they may elicit from the spectator, but to impose on them a certain discipline of perception. Tarantino’s choreographed sequences of inordinate violence reminds us of the old truism that represented violence is hardly the same as actual violence. Not only does represented violence differ from actual violence, but the representation of violence required that it be conceived, perceived, and consumed differently. In other words, the stylization attempts to suggest, at once didactically and playfully, how the spectator is invited to view such performance of violence. Perhaps engrossingly self-referential, not only do his films reference the cinematic universe, but they also set the coordinates for their viewing and critique.
The stylization (based on animation or hyperbolic repetition and intensity) recreates a distance that becomes Tarantino’s primary aesthetic and formal tool, which, instead of mythifying violence, presents it within a specific system of signs. In short, these two sequences in Kill Bill I illustrate how the overt violence in Tarantino’s films is generally codified to signal its own falsity. As some have argued, the overt violence in Tarantino can be considered the most tamed, cinematically speaking, of all the violent elements embedded in his film.
If we broaden our understanding of violence to include the experience of not only shock or outrage but also perplexity, confusion, and doubt, Tarantino’s films are indeed teeming with elements that perform an awaking violence on our perceptive capacities, which have turned either dormant or blindly susceptible to inherited aesthetic norms. Few other films disrupt the order of narrative events more adroitly than Tarantino’s, which constantly interrupt the causal lines of transition that conversely govern the structure of classical cinema. Broadly assuming the form of a jigsaw puzzle, none of his 7 films adopt even the semblance of a linear temporal structure.
Reservoir Dogs arguably presents one of the least disrupted temporalities. The film opens with the lengthy diner scene, in which a group of men drink coffee, smoke, and banter, and ends hours later, when not many of the group remain alive. What is surprising about Reservoir Dog’s more or less linear structure is that the central event that drives the narrative from the opening sequence forward is never shown. (I say more or less linear because on numerous occasions the main narrative line cuts to jump to the past to explicate how some of the individuals end up in the diner at the start of the film.)
After the dinner sequence, the film continues with a car sequence in which Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are frantically escaping from something or somewhere and speeding to the next destination. Roth’s character is severely wounded, and though he has not lost consciousness he finds himself in blinding, delirium-thrusting pain. He has been shot in the gut. Behind the steering wheel, Mr. White consoles Mr. Orange while nervously trying to decide what the best course of action is in the circumstances. Wasting irrecoverable blood, Mr. Orange lies in the back seat with his head against the left window. The car’s white-leathered seats accentuate the presence of Mr. Orange’s blood pretty everywhere in the back area of the car.
Because of the camera’s still position, the rhythm of this lengthy sequence is set by how Mr. Orange’s blood gradually stains the back area of the car. Tortured by pain, he recoils in his seat. He wants the pain to stop. He wants out. But the static gaze of the camera intensifies the fact that he is indeed going nowhere, and that the pain is getting only worse. For the duration of the sequence, he is stuck there, churning, turning, bending, folding, moving in damning pain.
Captured by a third-person point-of-view camera, the two men talk briefly about the blinding pain, possible survival, and the imminent help from someone named Joe. Something certainly has gone awry, but it is not entirely clear how, where or why.
The gap lingers as it also advances the plot. In fact, one could argue that the gap lingers to structure the plot, which assumes layered form insofar as the gap is preserved.
Realism 