Trouble and Desire

from The Blood Poets, Vol 2, by Jake Horsley

 

You can’t work with a psychopath... A psychopath is not a professional!

—Mr White, Reservoir Dogs

 

Reservoir Dogs begins gently enough with a quirky, fly-on-the-wall conversation scene in a cafe: eight guys in matching suits and ties bicker over the meanings of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” and the pros and cons of tipping. There follows a self-consciously cool credit sequence, as the eight hoods stroll in slow motion through the concrete jungle to the sounds of ’70s rock and roll. Then—without further ado—Tarantino cuts to the chase: a garishly bloody scene of Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) bleeding to death in the back seat of a moving car, whining and blubbering to the driver, Mr. White (Keitel), who does his best to console his obviously doomed partner. From this moment on, Reservoir Dogs is already starting to go horribly wrong. The color of the blood is far too bright (it looks like rasberry ripple) and the acting way too overwrought, the dialogue too explicit. It’s a tawdry, poorly staged scene and there’s no way of ever knowing—at such an early stage—whether it’s meant to be sickly comic or geniunely horrific. As it is, like most of the violence in the film, it’s just sick—nasty and lurid and way too explicit.

Reservoir Dogs is hip, alright, nihilistic and wholly shallow. Meant as a kind of postmodern, urban-gothic, ultraviolent comedy, it comes across as merely a slick and unpleasant melodrama. The only thing in the film that makes it stand out above ordinary video-exploitation fare is the quality of the dialogue and acting, and several decent characterizations (Tim Roth in his gentler moments, and Chris Penn as Nice Guy Eddie, as well as Michael Masden as the psychotic Mr. Blonde). But even here much of the confrontational scenes play badly: characters seem predisposed to rant and rave rather than communicate, like Pinter on speed, and at times the actors seem to be making up their lines as they go along. I suppose this can pass for naturalistic; certainly it worked for Scorsese in Raging Bull, but in that film there was a crude l evel of soul-searching at work, whereas here, the predominant feeling is only that the writer-director is straining to be clever, with his “unwritten” dialogue. (A lot of Tarantino’s trademark repartee may read well on the page, but it plays poorly—once two actors are forced to try and put some life into it, they find it all but impossible to do so without seeming almost ridiculously mannered themselves.) The dialogue here is stilted, it’s not real conversational rhythms we’re hearing but Tarantino’s idea of such, and it’s all too obvious the actors, who are apparently reading the lines word for word, are unable to make them their own. (This was also apparent in the opening scene—the weakest in the film—of Pulp Fiction, with Jules and Vincent discussing hamburgers and foot massage, and it’s equally numbing here in the scenes between Steve Buscemi—as Mr. Pink—and Keitel, who yell and bark at each other with all the method manicness they can muster, but come off like two people who don’t know how to act.[1])

Reservoir Dogs is one of those movies in which literally everyone winds up dead (the  only exception I can think of is the black cop who teaches Tim Roth’s Freddy how to be a method actor for his undercover work). Yet there’s not a moment of regret or sympathy afforded for these characters—none of them (with the exception Freddy, who we get to see in his home environment) even seem to have real lives or personalities beyond their black suits and ties. But then, Tarantino isn’t trying for symapthy here—he’s trying for a more ironic, detached approach, and he’s not interested in invoking our emotions, as such. Reservoir Dogs is probably the coldest popular American movie since Full Metal Jacket, and I’ve no doubt that Stanley Kubrick loved Tarantino’s film. But then, just about everyone did, which is just one of those mysteries (to me). I think that audiences responded above all to the freshness of Tarantino’s approach to the genre, and that the cynicism, and the lack of sentimentality, of the film seemed like something new, something radical even, after so many string-pulling, thumb-screw style action movies. And certainly, Dogs is far superior to your average shoot ’em up, if only for the degree of thought that has gone into it: there’s clearly a sensibility at work here, and Tarantino is trying for something different, something wholly his own. But—like the button says—being weird isn’t enough, and Dogs isn’t really weird, in any case, it’s merely quirky. Its most striking feature is the distancing effect it has on the audience, and its relentless mix of irony and brutality, which is, after all, in a long generic tradition, from Kurosawa to Leone to Peckinpah to George Miller.

The most notorious sequence in the film is of course the “ear-slicing” scene, and I’d wager that the considerable amount of controversy and hoopla created over this particular scene played a large part in the film’s success, and in its becoming the cause celebré that people felt almost duty-bound to see (if only in order to be able to partake of the controversy). I’m not sure how conscious this was on Tarantino’s part, but I think he must have been aware that the scene in question would create a certain amount of heat around his movie (and that this heat might serve to get audiences jumping, and talking); because, as it is, the scene really has no raison d’être, beyond being an extremely nasty and unusually sadistic moment in the history of screen violence. I mean to say that the scene doesn’t have any emotional meaning or any real context in the film—it shows us that Mr. Blonde is a psycho, but then we’ve already been told that; more importantly, it shows us that Tarantino has a very sick sense of humor and a pretty unflinching ability to gross us out. But is that really an attribute to be admired in an artist?  Personally, I don’t think so, and I find the ear-slicing scene one of the few really repulsive, wholly gratuitous moments of cinematic violence in a serious movie that I have ever had to sit through. It has absolutely no poetry to it, and it is not especially skillfully or imaginatively staged (the use of a rock ’n’ roll song on the soundtrack is hardly original, after all—ever since Mean Streets in ’73, directors have been juxtaposing violence with rock ’n’ roll to far better effect than here). And, most damningly of all, it has no real emotional power. We don’t feel grief or suffering on the part of the nameless, all but faceless cop—we merely feel disgust and repulsion at the sadistic delight which Mr. B londe takes in defacing him. It’s an emotionally weightless scene, neither traumatic nor disturbing, but only physically sickening. To those who argue (as some do) that violence is indeed a sickening thing, I have to counter—do we really need to be told that, much less shown it? If Tarantino had filmed a live chicken being decapitated and gutted, it would have had roughly the same effect on us, but it wouldn’t have required any artistry or imagination, only the sheer will, or perversity, to do it. Of course, the scene did cause a controversy, and to a certain extent Tarantino was instrumental in making people face up to and analyse their own feelings about movie violence, which can only be a good thing. But again, the point is, it’s movie violence that’s being discussed, not real violence. All Tarantino’s movies take place in a kind of vacuum, where the only points of reference come from other movies. The scene, like the film itself—because of it’s lack of any depth or visual beauty—doesn’t give rise in us to any deeper feelings of ambiguity or horror concerning such sadistic actions (such as, for example, the torture scenes in Blue Velvet do). And it doesn’t even come close to evoking the sheer anguish and misery (and the loathing for violence) that Casualties of War inflicts upon us. Tarantino is just playing a game with audience perceptions/expectations here, much as Hitchcock used to do, but nowhere near as dexterously.[2] And of course, audiences love to play along with such games—they get to feel they’re in on something, and even those who hated the scene felt—I would wager—like they were being square if they said so (or rather, if they showed distaste for the movie and its director for submitting them to it). Of course, violence is “hip,” and if you don’t think so, that just makes you squeamish. Go see Dumbo, or something. Tarantino was a man whose time had come, obviously.          

Reservoir Dogs, I suspect, was defended, and perhaps even lauded, by people who might normally have dismissed it as the tacky pulp that it is, but felt as though they’d be siding with the squares if they did so—the uptight, straight-laced, humorless, censorship-crying, hysteria-mongering moral majority mugs who wouldn’t know a work of art if it cracked them over the skull. But decrying a scene such as this as vile and gratuitous and devoid of artistic merit isn’t the same as saying it shouldn’t be allowed. And admitting I found a scene in which a man is bound to a chair and has his ear removed with a straight razor—just for the sheer fun of it—to be not only aesthetically but also morally disgusting, surely that doesn’t make me a prude and a prig? If Tarantino had handled the scene differently, and embued it with some visual power, and moral or emotional weight, then I would have been the first to give him his due. The question here isn’t what he did, it’s how he did it. And Reservoir Dogs is a film that’s been hailed and lauded above all for what it pretends to be, rather than what it actually is.      

Tarantino set out to make a kinetic, explosive, ferociously original, gritty, cynical and crackling comedy, the last word on the tough-guy movie ethic, and the first word on a new kind of absurdist nihilism. And that’s what people responded to, I think, as if grand intentions were all that were needed to make a classic. But the film I saw was a lame, weakly plotted, well-structured and adequately directed but wholly desultorary piece of B-movie trash. Enough perhaps to create some curiosity as to its director and suggest promise for the future, but hardly sufficient to merit the heralding of the new Martin Scorsese, or even the new Sam Fuller. Julie Birchill (in the British Daily Mail) called Reservoir Dogs “the best film ever made.” Hmmm... Right. Move over Intolerance, Potemkin, move over Citizen Kane and Grande Illusion and Bicycle Thief and Jules and Jim and Orphée and Seven Samurai, The Godfather, Vertigo, The Wild Bunch, Taxi Driver and Blue Velvet, and make way for... Reservoir Dogs! But Birchill’s comment was only the most ludicrous pinnacle of a general case of collective critical hysteria that served to create, by some strange form of mass hysteria-cum-collusive delusion, a media event out of a mildly interesting debut film.

Admittedly, the film does boast an unusally imaginative structure, laying flashback upon flashback and stories within stories, in an almost literary fashion, so that our point of view is shifted around dexterously and playfully, making the film somewhat like gazing into a kaleidoscope. But this is largely a gimmick, and though it adds a certain intricacy to the film, it doesn’t really give it any more depth. The best scenes in the film, I think, along with a brief one between Nice Guy Eddie and the just-released Vic Vega (Mr Blonde), is—ironically enough—the one scene that never really “happens,” namely, the made-up story Freddy rehearses with his cop partner and then tells to the guys, in order to allay their suspicions and get on good terms with them. (It involves his being caught in a public toilet with a bag of grass, a group of cops and a police dog.)

It’s a mistake also I think for Tarantino never to show us the heist itself. He’s been complimented on this, but the only reason I can see for his decision not to is simply that the heist is what we’re all expecting to see, so he wants to confound our expectations. But there’s a willed perversity to this, because of course there’s a perfectly good reason why the heist scene is expected (it’s really pretty mandatory in a heist movie!)—without it the characters and the surrounding scenes (not the mention the money) seem to be floating around in a vacuum. And so none of what is being said and done in the film seems of much consequence, finally, without seeing the heist which brought it all about. Also, because most of the action takes place on the one location (the warehouse), the film desperately needs a real set-piece to give it extra substance; as it is it seems rather too much like what it is: a theater piece filmed over a couple of weekends, with a bunch of guys and a couple of cameras, and loads of blood. The film is overwritten, but under-conceived—it’s a skit stetched out almost interminably to be an epic thriller, in the Beckett-absurdist vein. These guys all seem to be waiting for something without knowing what they’re waiting for. Alarm bells go off in our heads—this is existentialist realism! But Tarantino is no Beckett, that much is certain, and his idea of absurdist wit is a little difficult, finally, to distinguish from careless writing—it effectively leaves the characters stranded, with nothing left to do but piss and moan. Maybe they’re waiting for the plot to come along and rescue them from the author’s conceit?

                                                                             *

 


[1]. Keitel is too intense an actor for leading roles anyway—he’s best of all at playing supporting, peripheral characters (which is how Scorsese used him in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, and even, in a way, in Mean Streets, where De Niro’s Johnny Boy was the more dominant presence). When he’s the lead, as in Bad Lieutenant and here, he tires you out with all the fevered, furrowed deliberateness of his acting—he crowds you and there seems nothing spontaneous or joyful about him, no surprises to the performance.

[2]. For example, the way in which his camera moves away at the last moment before the ear is sliced, not from squeamishness but from a curious sort of modesty, or even indifference. And yet many people who saw the film swear they saw the ear coming off, maybe because they looked away at that moment?