Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (19 page)

Even Tarantino cannot tell a story without the three unities—no one can—but he can toy with them in ways that
enhance
the story, if he’s good (and he is good). Aristotle’s point (if those old French fuddy-duddies had
read
him a little more closely) was not that the three unities
must
be preserved at
all
costs; his point was don’t
confuse
your audience, needlessly, if you want to tell a good story—non-French audiences will put up with very little of being confused, and most importantly, the audience wants
catharsis
. That means, the audience wants to give
you
, the playwright, the filmmaker, a piece of their time, of their
experience
, and they will give you their “willing suspension of disbelief”
(they will pretend what you are showing them is “real”), so they can have a certain
kind
of experience, and when it is over, well, they want to
feel
better. So if you want the audience to experience catharsis, you should keep in mind that the three unities are important. It’s not like Tarantino doesn’t know that.

Yet, toying around with the three unities can create an enhanced experience, and can bring the audience closer to the filmmaker’s art. Putting the vignettes out of sequence can (and
does
in the case of
Pulp Fiction
) force us to focus more of our attention on the characters. But we don’t focus on their development, or even on their likely destinies in the story—I mean, halfway through the movie we already know that Vinnie bites the big one. Rather, we focus on who these people are, how they think, what their values are. Since we don’t know which characters are more important, we pay attention to
all
of them. Thus, Tarantino invites us to enjoy his characters, just for who they are, and uses time-twisting to give us that experience. But whereas Hitchcock, for example, likes to create a
distance
between the filmmaker’s art and the audience, to conceal his art so that, frankly, he can toy with their psychology, and whereas Gibson wants to do experiments in mind-control, Tarantino is like a boy in his tree house. And you are invited to join the club. Yes, it’s
his
tree house, but all you need is the password, and he’ll give you all the clues you need to get in. He doesn’t want to control you, or toy with you, he just wants to play. You already know the game. It’s just good (not so clean) fun, and time flies when you’re having it.

With
Pulp Fiction
, it is easy to experience the movie and “get it,” intuitively. As Tarantino told Charlie Rose, it isn’t confusing at all. Focus on the characters and don’t worry too much about the order of events. Trust Tarantino. He has a plan. But actually sitting down and graphing the “objective” sequence of events is more challenging than just sort of “understanding” what happened. I couldn’t resist taking the script and putting it in temporal sequence, just to see how it looks. This is how it happens:

The whole sequence unfolds on three different days. The movie begins around 7:00 AM on one day and the first event is
Vincent Vega (John Travolta
⁸⁷
) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) driving to a “hit.” The last event is Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) driving off on poor dead Zed’s chopper.
⁸⁸
Butch has just shot Vinnie, after catching him with his pants down. All the other events in the movie happen in between.
⁸⁹
The first day is mainly Jules’s story. The second day is mainly Vinnie’s story. The third day is mainly Butch’s story.

It is written in the classic style, a plot, “Vinnie’s very bad day” (okay, three days, all bad), and two subplots, Jules and Butch. The rest of the characters support either the main story of Vinnie, or one of the subplots, or two of the subplots, or one subplot and the main story, or both subplots and the main story. The three main characters play supporting roles in each other’s stories to varying degrees. Then each story includes discussion of the other stories in the dialogue. It isn’t all that complicated.

The McGuffin
⁹⁰
of Butch’s story is a watch handed down from Butch’s father—a
time
piece of course, and Butch simply cannot go into the future without it; he would sooner die. The clues about time throughout the movie are everywhere: there is a gratuitous clock ticking in the background in scene after scene. Tarantino wants us to know what time it is, but he buries the time references like clues to a treasure in the constant banter and in the background. He wants us to piece the actual temporal sequence together. He dares us to do it. Why? Because it’s fun; it’s a
clé anglaise
Tarantino wants us to discover for ourselves. Obviously he (and Avery) conceived of the story roughly in order, at first, and then monkeyed around with it until it made a different kind of sense, showed us different things about these characters than we could have seen in the regular sequence, and concealed things we surely would have noticed. Tarantino builds the “dare” into his subtitle: “Three Stories . . . About One Story . . .” So what’s the “one story” and what are the “three stories”? He even puts in the ellipses to clue you in to the fact that
you’re
supposed to fill in the blanks. I couldn’t resist. It’s too much fun.

One of the concealed things that everyone would immediately notice, if the movie unfolded in temporal sequence, is that the entire movie is about “Vinnie’s Very Bad Day” (okay, three days in one story). Out of sequence it isn’t even obvious that Vinnie is the main character, but in sequence the whole movie is a story about how he screws up just one time too many. Placing the movie out of sequence leads us to pay
more
attention to the supporting characters than we otherwise would, as I mentioned. We don’t know if the movie is about Vinnie, or Jules, or Butch. This is our unholy trinity: we are led to have
some
sympathy for each of them, in spite of their, shall we say,
“flaws.” So those are the three stories, but
Pulp Fiction
is a story about Vinnie. When we look at it this way, the thing that becomes undeniably clear is the moral of the story. Butch and Jules walk away and Vinnie dies. The question is why? What is Tarantino’s point? I may be wrong, but I think I’ve got it figured out. There is something about the way that Butch and Jules think, about the way they see life and face its challenges that Vinnie just doesn’t get.

It’s impossible not to notice how Tarantino loves to cross-reference and inter-mix his movies, so there are clues in other movies about how to understand
Pulp Fiction
. Everyone knows that Vincent Vega is Vic Vega’s brother, and Vic is the scariest of all the scary characters in
Reservoir Dogs
. And it is as plain as the nose on your face that the entire script in
Reservoir Dogs
was designed to set up a show-down imitating the Mexican Standoff in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, when Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco stand almost endlessly in the Sad Hill Cemetery, while the audience sweats. By the time it is over with, we are all ready to shoot Sergio Leone for torturing us (we loved it, it’s so
not
like Mel Gibson), and then we later find out that we were screwed—Tuco’s gun wasn’t even loaded, and Blondie knew it all along. We love that too.

Tarantino
knows
that we know the game and that we love it. So in
Reservoir Dogs
he gives us a Mexican stand-off in which we cannot see how
any
of the characters can back down, and then he makes us wait. We wonder whether someone’s gun isn’t loaded and someone else knows it. But no, everyone has bullets. And no, no one backs down. Tarantino shows us what we actually
wanted
to see in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
, but Sergio Leone hadn’t left that option for himself—the movie would have been over and no one would have gotten the treasure (which was the McGuffin in this case). In
Reservoir Dogs
, Tarantino saves the stand-off for the end of the movie. By the time we come to it, he can do anything he wants, and we all know it. We have absolutely no idea what he will do. That’s fun. But Tarantino cannot stand to settle on just one ending for such a great scenario.

Taken in sequence, the Mexican stand-off in
Pulp Fiction
would have happened in the middle of the movie—after the visit to Monster Joe’s Truck and Tow, but just before Jules delivers the mysterious glowing briefcase (which is the McGuffin of Jules’s story) to Marsellus Wallace at the bar.
⁹¹
Having the Mexican stand-off in the middle would be no good at all, as anyone can plainly see. Of course, by showing it out of sequence, Tarantino frames the movie with the Mexican Stand-off, and then has
everyone
walk away, having gotten some of what they wanted, but sacrificing something to get it.
⁹²
That works.

But Tarantino’s stand-offs are very different. In both movies, instead of playing off of greed, self-interest, and the survival instinct, he makes each scenario revolve around loyalty. This raises the Mexican stand-off to a much higher ethical plane. The reason no one can back down in
Reservoir Dogs
is because each is loyal to a person or a principle that he simply cannot violate. Joe Cabot and Nice Guy Eddie know that Vic Vega has been loyal to them, because of the years he spent in prison to protect them, and that is why they know Mr. Orange, who killed Vic, is the undercover detective. They would rather die rather than let Orange live. This establishes the “loyalty of the Vegas,” or the family honor, in the Tarantino universe. This is an important point to notice. But where loyalty is easy for Vic (he is simply
made of
loyalty), his little brother Vinnie has to struggle with the idea. Vinnie doesn’t lack courage, but he is weak-willed; Aristotle calls this weakness of the will “incontinence.” Incontinent people fare poorly in Tarantino’s ethical world. As Winston Wolf so memorably puts it, “Just because you
are
a character doesn’t mean you
have
character.”

Aristotle makes a point about characters that is pretty hard to deny: “the agents represented must be either above our own
level of goodness, or beneath it, or just such as we are.”
⁹³
Now, if you want to tell a good story, one that brings catharsis, you don’t have that many choices. You can start with good men and teach us that they are more like us than we thought (the tragic fall), or you can start with bad men and show that
they
are more like us than we thought.
We
are pretty boring, which is why we go to the movies.

You would think that the French, for all their love of Aristotle, would understand this simple point. But they are still quite peevish about the defeat of Classicism; Aristotle is now their ex-husband, and now they must pretend they never were married to him. Now the
modes du temps
is to be more
avantgarde
than Thou. Yeah, right, whatever. Anyway, French directors love to show people who are better than us becoming worse than us, people like us getting worse than bad people, and people who are worse than us getting worse than they already were. Sometimes they show people like us doing nothing at all. Anything else is a “Hollywood ending” and beneath their aesthetic dignity.
¹⁵

Tarantino, without exception, starts out with people who are worse than we are and shows us how they aren’t so
very
bad. That’s how we get catharsis. Think about Jimmie’s wife in
Pulp Fiction
, the vignette he calls “The Bonnie Situation.”
⁹⁴
Here you have two vicious killers and a dude they call “The Wolf” dashing around, like their heads are fire and their asses are catchin’, to clean up evidence of poor Marvin’s mishap,
⁹⁵
and the principal thing that motivates this rush is . . . what Jimmie’s
wife
will say when she gets home and the house is full of killers covered with blood? Now that,
that
would be pretty bad, if Jimmie got in
trouble
with his wife. It’s pretty hard to deny that Tarantino is consciously moving these killers in our general direction. But that isn’t the Moral of the Story. It’s just a condition for catharsis. Nothing fancy is going on here, just a boy in a tree house playing cops and robbers with Aristotle.

But the rules are a little different in this game. In most movies the audience knows within the first five minutes who will be the main character. That is no fun. In
Pulp Fiction
, you might watch the movie nine times and still not immediately grasp which is the main character. As I said, Vinnie is the main character in the movie, which isn’t obvious until the script is put into sequence. When it is, it becomes very clear that Vinnie is a bumbling anti-hero who becomes the victim of his own carelessness. None of his character flaws—selfishness, laziness, hubris, careless inattention, even weakness of the will—is his “central flaw.” And we are supposed to overlook the fact that Vinnie is a ruthless killer, because frankly, everyone he kills is at least as bad as he is. As the Wolf says, “Nobody who’ll be missed,” at least by us.
⁹⁶
There will be no serious investigation, and you, my dear middle-American, have nothing to fear from Vincent Vega. Tarantino is not going to get preachy about character flaws in any case. The
Moral of the Story does not come from some lesson about what makes a hit man a bad person.

Apart from Vinnie, it is pretty hard to miss that Butch, filled with testosterone and pride as he is, has a soft spot for his dear departed dad, and dangerous though he is, he puts up with whining from Fabienne that none of us would begin to tolerate.
⁹⁷
And Jules, well, he is
trying
to be the shepherd. He is by far the most dangerous of the dangerous boys, but even he believes in miracles, scolds blasphemers, and reads the Bible.
⁹⁸