Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (18 page)

Like Jackie, Ordell sees reason as a term that functions differently in different language games. Louis wants to use it in the familiar “language-game of giving information,” as Wittgenstein
puts it. He wants to explain to Ordell why he shouldn’t be held accountable for his incompetence, in as rational a manner as his intellect can muster. Ordell, on the other hand, has no patience for this language-game. His language-game is the language-game of demonstrating his aggression and superiority. In that game, “reason”
means
more or less the same thing that it means in Louis’s game, but its
use
is quite different. How pragmatic Ordell’s application of the term is, it must be said, is another matter.

Jackie’s (and Max’s) pragmatism shows its strength most clearly in its adaptability to the aporias and unknowns that render right action so murkily uncertain. Ordell is taken aback by developments that don’t correspond to his preset expectations. “I didn’t know you liked the Delfonics,” he says suspiciously as he gets in Max’s car and turns on the stereo. Unpredictability throws him off. For Jackie and Max, by contrast, uncertainties are a constant fact of life, and are what “rationalizing” helps to negotiate. Max gives his partner Winston some instructions in preparation for the final showdown at the Bail Bond shop, and Winston expresses his faith in Max’s judgment:

To know the difference between what one knows one knows and what one only thinks one knows is to possess a great advantage over someone who takes “know” to be a reliable, constant index of certainty. What Jackie and Max appreciate, whether consciously or instinctively, is that knowledge, like any other term, has its limits, and those limits are determined by the type of language-game being played. To hold out for a limitless knowledge, outside of language altogether, is vain and counterproductive. In a world where aporia is a reliable constant, conscious uncertainty is more pragmatic than rigid certainty.

RANDALL E. AUXIER

There’s nothing
essentially
new in Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
, and that’s part of the point, as he often says in interviews—to use every Hollywood cliché, but to present these in combinations that the audience has not seen before. It’s Hollywood with a (Jack Rabbit Slim’s) twist contest.

Aristotle once insisted that the whole “poetic art” was just one big imitation of life (and that includes film, although Aristotle wasn’t much of a movie-goer). For about two thousand years after Aristotle said that, everybody agreed—until one day in the late eighteenth century when some Germans and a few renegade Brits got bored with watching French soldiers kill everybody, and started insisting that the poetic art is
really
the expression of the artist’s feelings, not mainly an imitation of life. They said it out of pure spite. That really pissed off the French army, because they liked Aristotle.

The French, who were the champions of “classical aesthetics,” had an especially snooty way of reading Aristotle. They said you have to follow the rules in order to make worthy art, and especially you have to have three things to make a story work, the “three unities” is what we now call them: unity of (1) time, (2) place, and (3) action. You have to tell your audience, at least vaguely,
where
the characters are, and keep it constant. And they also thought you should present the events in their proper temporal sequence, so that no one gets confused. You can see where this is going, I’ll bet. In the movie industry, even in
Tarantino movies, there is a dude whose job it is to assure the “continuity” of the set and props to make sure things don’t move around from one cut to the next and one scene to the next. He’s sort of the master of time and space in the movie universe—or perhaps he’s just Aristotle’s Gallic slave boy.

But really time and place are just unities of
action
, which is what all the fuss is actually about. Aristotle says: “The truth is that . . . imitation is of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin [that is the time requirement] or dislocate [that is the place requirement] the whole”
⁸⁰

The French were quite inflexible about this “requirement” back in those days. At first they had long-winded arguments with the Germans and the Brits (the French even accused Shakespeare of being a bad playwright because he liked to mess around with the three unities), but eventually it just had to become a shooting war. This was called the Battle of Classicism and Romanticism. The Germans pulled out the big guns to hold the center, like Goethe and Beethoven, and finished with a heroic charge by Wagner (commanding some Vikings and a detachment called the Light Brigade); the Brits reinforced with Byron and Shelley and Keats (all regrettably killed in action), and deployed Coleridge and Wordsworth to protect the flanks. The French eventually moved on to Africa to kill people who didn’t have quite so many guns. The three unities were in full retreat. People started writing whatever they damn well pleased while the Sun King turned over in his lavish rococo grave. It’s amazing the things people will fight for.
⁸¹

Americans don’t give a shit about such things. That’s why we serve (bad) beer at the McDonald’s in Paris and call the sandwich “Le Big Mac.” We’re mocking them and they just eat it up (complaining all the while). And then they pay us good money to watch our supposedly inferior movies (and that’s what they are, “movies,” not “films”). We’re laughing all the way to the bank. That’s our revenge on the French for their uppity ingratitude and hypocrisy. That and Michael Moore. They must know, I mean they
must
, that we set up that whole
Fahrenheit 9/11
thing just to see if they were really so far up their own asses as to honestly give that joker the
Palm d’Or
for that ridiculous string of pulp celluloid. They went for it, and for Le Big Mac. Idiots.
⁸²

Tarantino doesn’t read Aristotle, and he doesn’t imitate life; he imitates other art. And no one, I mean
no one
, is having more fun than our boy Tarantino. It ought to be a crime. In France it
is
. He bats around the three unities like a kitten. And he’s no romantic either. If Tarantino were actually expressing his
feelings
in his movies, we would have to wonder about whether he should be locked up. Of course, Mel Gibson should be locked up regardless of whether he’s imitating or expressing.
⁸³
Maybe we should put him in a birka and send him to
gay Paris
.

But with Tarantino, this imitation/expression thing actually makes a real difference. He is imitating other art—well, just other movies. Part of the reason he can get away with making us cringe so often is that we know he is toying with the art form, and with us, and it is thoroughly playful. Yes, we wonder about him a little bit, but not too much, once we get his game. One of the techniques discussed over and over in Tarantino interviews, reviews, and criticism, is his boyish experimentation with showing us what
was
not
on the screen in some classic scene he imitates, and
not
showing us what they originally showed us. He knows we will fill in the other part ourselves. It gives us something to do. Tarantino is always playing this game—look at the classic movie (even a B or a C movie), ask yourself what you’re
not
seeing that you
want
to see, reframe the scene from a new perspective, and then let everybody fill in the rest. It’s great fun.

By contrast, Mel Gibson thinks something like: chain the viewer to a seat like poor Alex in
A Clockwork Orange
and administer the Ludovico Technique. Leave nothing to the imagination, and be certain your movie-goer is no longer able to think when it’s over, or to get the images out of his poor brain ever afterwards. It is not fun. It is abuse. So while Tarantino is about art imitating art for the delight of us all, Gibson is about art imitating Nazi prison guards for the sake of . . . only God knows what. Some part of us apparently likes to be tortured (after all, we elected Bush and Cheney twice, sort of), but not our
best
part. Just say no.

But that old argument the philosophers used to have over whether art is imitation or expression can help us a little bit. No matter how hard he may try, an artist can’t really imitate anything without placing an original stamp on the final product. It happens, one way or another, as decisions are made about what to leave in and what to leave out. And we love Tarantino because he lets
us
play along, participate in the movie, place our own stamp on the film in all the places that he activates our imaginations with whatever he left out of the frame. On the other side, Gibson expresses himself, alone, and forbids us, with a cat-o’-nine-tails if necessary, to see
anything
but what he shows us. If Tarantino is the
enfant terrible
of contemporary directors, Gibson is surely the
rex tyrannis
. I could be wrong about this, but I would wager a Hanzo katana that not one person who truly admires and understands Tarantino also likes Gibson’s films. There is a reason. Some people like to have fun, others just want to be tortured.

Much ink has been spilt over the temporal sequencing of
Pulp Fiction
, but the critics and writers are not often familiar with the
philosophy of time. The point that intrigues me most is that Tarantino points out (in an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1994) that for all of its disjointed sequencing, there is nothing confusing about the movie—it is easy to follow, so long as you pay attention. Tarantino made this remark with perfect confidence, and indeed he is correct. Anyone who watches the movie can untangle its temporal sequence with a little effort. Tarantino invites us to do so. However, this feat of untangling is easier to accomplish
intuitively
than
intellectually
.

There are really two ways of understanding time. There is “clock time” and there is “experienced time.” They aren’t the same at all. Sometimes an hour on the clock seems like it takes forever to pass, like when you’re at the dentist or watching a Mel Gibson film. Other times, an hour just seems to fly by, like when you’re watching
Kill Bill
the way it was intended to be seen—all four hours at once. A philosopher named Henri Bergson (1859-1941) wrote a bunch of books about the differences between “clock time” and “experienced time.”
⁸⁴
People who like movies love this guy Bergson, because all the way back in 1907 he started writing about how movies do what they do—using light and the movement of machinery (the camera and then the projector) to create the illusion that real time is unfolding before our eyes.

Bergson thought that “clock time” wasn’t really “time” at all; we just invent ways of turning time into
space
(that way we can artificially “even out” the dentist chair experience and the
experience of the Tarantino movie). Think about it for a second. Look at the calendar on your wall. It’s a bunch of little squares arranged on a rectangle. That’s space,
mon ami
, not time. The calendar just sort of sits there, being the same, and only your
act
of reading the calendar, anticipating the next days and remembering the last ones, brings it to life. It’s the same with a clock, hanging there in space, being an arrangement of circles and lines. Yes, it moves, but you have to admit that it isn’t very interesting to watch it move. It’s just spatial arrangements imitating the experience of time.

A movie is sort of like a clock combined with a calendar: lots of little squares strung together with a motor to make them move. But it’s really all just space and machinery. So Bergson says, “real time” is in our
experience
of things, not in the way we turn those experiences into spatial arrangements that imitate the experience. If that is right (and it is) then the “real” movie is
not
the string of celluloid running through the projector; the real movie is what’s happening to
you
when you sit through it. Tarantino gets this. How many times has he said that the key to being a good director and writer is to be a good movie-goer? Pay attention to what you are experiencing when you watch a movie. Aristotle said as much in his clear emphasis on the audience in his
Rhetoric
and
Poetics
.

It is true that a movie is made by turning every single second into something like a calendar: we storyboard the script down to the level of the “shot,” analyze each one down to the last detail, and then create the illusion of continuity by setting actions into motion within the narrow limits of the shot. In this case, actors are like machines adding motion to the temporal limits of the “shot.” As soon as they’ve gotten the shot, what was “experienced time” for the actors is now just a series of still pictures, but we can re-assemble the pictures any way we like. Yet, a mere assemblage of pictures does not make a “movie.” The movie becomes a
real
movie when someone sees it, experiences it in his own “real time”. . . with popcorn, or KY jelly, or whatever you like to bring along to enhance your experience. A projector just running a film, no matter how well made, but with no one watching, may still be a “film,” but it isn’t a movie.
⁸⁵

So we’re watching
Pulp Fiction
, and that devilish director has instructed the editor to put the whole thing out of sequence.
⁸⁶
We all know that most movies are shot out of sequence (which makes movie-acting an interesting challenge), but Tarantino also wants us now to
experience
it out of sequence. He is far from the first to try this, but he may be better at it than others. Part of the reason he wants us to do that is that it helps us understand
his
world, just how free he is to play around with the art form. Christopher Nolan, by contrast, presents
Memento
out of sequence to convey to us the confusion of his main character, Leonard Shelby. But where Nolan is (carefully) confusing us for an effect, he is not exactly inviting us into his world. With Tarantino, we become aware that he can put things just anywhere he wants them. He wants us to
experience
what that is like for him to have that freedom, so that we can appreciate the decisions he made and share his playful delight at the effects. Yes, he is playing with us, but he is not
toying
with us; he is toying with the three unities for our edification.