Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (6 page)

When quizzed by critics about the questionable morality or possible social toll of its many excesses, Tarantino has been consistently dismissive. For instance, in an interview at the Montreal World Film Festival after Peter Brunette reminded him of the five hundred murders committed annually in Washington DC alone, and then wondered aloud about the ramifications of movie violence, Tarantino defended his work by claiming that an artist shouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of his art: “If I start thinking about society or what one person is doing to someone else, I have on handcuffs. Novelists don’t have to deal with that, painters don’t have to deal with that, musicians don’t have to deal with that.”
¹⁹

Okay. That’s an answer all right. But, wherever you stand on the issue, that
kind
of answer is less than philosophically satisfying. It sounds a little too much like he’s saying he shouldn’t be blamed for something he did simply because others have done it too. Well, maybe they have. But that doesn’t mean they
should
have. And it doesn’t
explain
Tarantino’s decision to do it. In fairness, of course, we should acknowledge that one of the traits common to all great artists (and according to Nietzsche, a trait common to all great
individuals
) is an unwillingness to pander to the demands of the status quo. But in order to determine if the dark and excessive elements in
Reservoir Dogs
and other Tarantino films do something more than merely push the envelope, Nietzsche must help us attribute to them a more profound function.

Oh, and where would
I
put
Reservoir Dogs
at the video store? In either the Foreign or Independent Film section, of course, since that’s where the most interesting movies seem to end up regardless of genre or country of origin.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a thinker who had a lot to say about excess as an artistic virtue, a life-
affirming
virtue. So who better than Nietzsche to help us understand Tarantino’s unique brand of excess? But not
every
form of excess is a virtue, even for Nietzsche. Endless barrels of blood and countless permutations of the same profane term in a single page of script can wear thin regardless of tolerance levels or proffered justifications. Unless we can discover a meaningful pattern, an effective artistic purpose or a creative significance to Tarantino’s characteristic transgressions, then there is little hope that even Nietzsche’s thought could help us assign them much lasting worth.

Like Tarantino, Nietzsche was fascinated by artistic depictions of brutality and suffering. In particular, Nietzsche was intrigued by the excessive cruelty and horrible senselessness that characterizes the art of entire periods in Greek history and manifestly lies at the heart of every Greek tragedy. To this decidedly troublesome dimension classicists and art historians before Nietzsche had turned a conveniently blind eye, attributing to virtually all Greek art the noble simplicity and calm grandeur that Winckelmann and Goethe had recognized in Hellenic architecture and sculpture—which is a little like attributing to every American film the characteristics of
Singin’ in the Rain
or
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

The profound question Nietzsche unflinchingly asked in response to this puzzle (which is the same question he would ask of Tarantino) was twofold. First, what essential truth about Greek (and human) nature are we concealing from ourselves by our refusal to investigate the source and ramifications of art and life’s more disturbing aspects (those troubles from which Gene Kelly’s angelic leading lady or Jimmy Stewart’s bumbling angelic messenger can’t rescue us)? Second, how is it that artistic depictions of violence, cruelty, heartbreak, suffering and death do not cause us the same emotional pain occasioned by the real events
they reference, but can even arouse in us a form of aesthetic pleasure? Or stated in generic terms, why do artists so compulsively depict the ugly, horrible, and painful as well as the beautiful, and what is it about art that so often allows spectators to find
all
such depictions pleasurable?

According to Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy
, the more sensitive Greek artists recognized in human nature a dialectical struggle between two primordial and ineradicable desires or impulses: an impulse toward the establishment of boundaries and forms, and the impulse toward their erosion or erasure. While it might be tempting to interpret this dialectic as a struggle between good and evil, especially for those of us who espouse Judeo-Christian morals, it would be wrong to do so.

The opposition Nietzsche has in mind is much closer (and certainly indebted) to Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime (a distinction between disinterested pleasure and ecstatic discomfort) and Schopenhauer’s relation between will and idea (primordial desire and its phenomenal manifestation); neither element of itself is good or bad, but each occasions a markedly different psychological experience. Unlike even Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s dualities, however, Nietzsche’s pair is
dialectically
antagonistic (each power incites its opposite to greater achievement) and
fundamentally definitive
of who and what we are (the struggle between these powers is internal to our very nature as human beings).

Nietzsche argued that a penetrating
aesthetic
analysis of Greek art and poetry (in opposition to the purely
logical
analyses of Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel) demonstrates the Greeks to have embodied these dialectical desires in the figures of their two principle art deities—respectively, Apollo and Dionysus.

Apollo was the soothsaying deity of beautiful illusion and measured moderation, the god of the imagistic, figurative, and philosophical arts, whose oracles demanded self-knowledge and denounced ambiguity and excess. The Apollonian impulse thus aimed at taming the wilder emotions, at dismembering the primitive whole of Nature into civilized individuals and unambiguous artistic forms, and at securing that individuality with moral boundaries, calculative reasoning, and contemplative detachment. In
Reservoir Dogs
, Tarantino’s prism-like breakdown of the rainbow-hued but homogeneous gang into individual
members each designated by a single color (Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde) is an inspired example of this Apollonian dismemberment, affected in order to secure individual identities and differentiate powers. But like any dismemberment, that separation is itself a violent and painful act, acknowledged in the film by every member’s resistance to that separation. Some, like Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, immediately resist when their names are assigned; others, like Mr. Orange and Mr. White, resist later through a symbolic refusal to maintain their discrete color and thus protect their artificial identity in the gang, revealing to each other their true identity and their prior place in the social whole.

The wine god Dionysus was the Greek deity of intoxicated abandon and communal revelry. He was the embodiment of the musical arts, and represented the impulse toward unity and transgressive freedom from restraint that finds its ecstatic consummation in experiences as diverse as mob violence, sexual intimacy, religious communion, and intoxicated bliss. The repressed pathologies and violent eruptions that doom the
Dogs
’ heist to failure in the first place and proceed to erode the integrity of each gang member’s “colored” individuality as the film advances are all examples of the Dionysian impulse toward a delight in childish cruelty and a primal need to trespass established boundaries. And the need to gather the gang back into a multi-colored singleness of purpose and musical harmony after the failed heist is a perfect instance of the Dionysian drive to recover its severed parts and redeem them in an intoxicated ecstasy of reunification.

Already we are beginning to glimpse provocative possibilities for interpreting Tarantino’s visceral affinity for violence and excess. Even at this early stage we could argue that many of the genre-bending and morally unsettling aspects of his movies are but artistic expressions (by both Tarantino and his fictional characters) of an otherwise sublimated desire for freedom from the alienating rational and institutional restraints that separate us into arbitrary racial, sexual, and religious sub-cultures, into discrete social classes, into legislatively-defined law-makers and law-breakers, and the like. Such a reading would locate Tarantino’s movies securely within the realm of the excessive Dionysian arts, now clearly seen as reactionary responses to the potentially tyrannical Apollonian cravings for
order and conformity, virtues that are bought only at the high price of social fragmentation.

To interpret Tarantino in this way would be sufficient to identify him as an observant and astute cultural critic (of which there are far fewer than we need). It would also help explain his work to some extent. Yet, we can push further. Nietzsche argued that the Apollonian arts (which the Dionysian arts dialectically oppose) are themselves reactionary responses to the formlessness and meaninglessness of the merciless, primordial Nature from which we all spring. Nietzsche also observed that while both these impulses are outgrowths of Nature, not every expression of them (however well-intentioned) produces a naturally beneficent or
creative
result. Some end in undeniably
destructive
acts or events. Nietzsche cited the dissolution of families, social disintegration, sexual licentiousness and wanton cruelty typical of the barbarian world as vivid examples of the Dionysian impulse gone horribly wrong. These were the very consequences, wrote Nietzsche, against which the Greeks tried to insulate themselves with Apollonian defenses like laws, morals, religious taboos, and philosophical arguments. But immoderately exercised institutional attempts to legislate order can go wrong as well. Just ask Socrates about the hemlock. The real genius of the Greeks, thought Nietzsche, was revealed by their willingness and ability to bind these two powers together artistically in various creative dynamics which allowed each power a legitimate and controlled form of release. A
dialectically tempered
expression of beautiful illusion and ecstatic excess was the secret behind the Greeks’ creative efforts, thought Nietzsche. And while these efforts certainly reached their apex in the perfect balance found in tragedy, Nietzsche didn’t argue that every art had to be perfectly balanced or tragic to be praiseworthy; he simply observed that
some
degree of balance should be secured in all art. But is it there in
Reservoir Dogs
? Are Tarantino’s Dionysian excesses
creative
, and are they
tempered or balanced
by Apollonian restraints and redemptive manifestations of beauty? That is the crucial question.

The excessive nature of the mutilation scene in
Reservoir Dogs
is undeniably disturbing, and in multiple registers: not only does
the act itself shock us, so too does the maniacal glee with which Madsen’s Mr. Blonde performs the act. Especially shocking is the incongruity we feel between the very real terror of Mr. Blonde’s act and its consequences, on the one hand, and the gleefulness of his actions and of the popular music to which they are choreographed, on the other hand. But that dissonance does not render the scene itself gleeful. Quite the contrary, the profoundly dissonant tone established by the music and the acting makes it all much more horrible than it would otherwise be. And without this scene the audience would not be immediately galvanized in critical sympathy for Tim Roth’s otherwise plaintive and flawed Mr. Orange when he regains consciousness and prevents Mr. Blonde from perpetrating a still more horrible act (burning the cop alive).

Tarantino says of the scene: “Early on, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax asked, ‘What do you think about taking the torture scene out?’ Cut it out? I wouldn’t. . . . Sure, I think the scene is pretty horrible. I didn’t make it for yahoos to hoot and holler. It’s supposed to be terrible. But I didn’t show it to convey a message.”
²⁰
Elsewhere, in answer to a question about the difference between realism and reality, and the recurring images of Mr. Orange slowly sliding down the warehouse ramp into a pool of his own blood, the ever-widening circumference of which measures out the real-time cinematic minutes of his approaching death, Tarantino makes a similar claim: “Tim Roth is lying there saying, ‘please hold me.’ That scene makes people uncomfortable. They say, ‘why don’t you move on. You’ve made your point.’ But it ain’t about making points! This guy is shot in the stomach and he’s begging to be taken to the hospital. You can’t deal with that in one or two sentences, and then move on” (Brunette, p. 32). Well, if we take Tarantino at his word and accept his claim that the violence is meant
neither
to provide a puerile, voyeuristic thrill
nor
simply to make a point about violence, then what
is
its function? And how is the violence related to the music?

Music typically functions in an American film either by “Mickey-Mousing” the action (imitating it in perfect synchronization) or by reinforcing—or just
forcing
, in less artistic
films—an emotional response to other cinematic elements, like dialogue and images. In
Reservoir Dogs
the music is scored in a different way entirely. Tarantino’s own take on the music is this:

He’s right. The music in his films is a major factor in shaping
ironic
rather than reactionary emotional responses to characters and events. Usually the music he chooses is happy, familiar, and satisfying, the melodic equivalent of comfort food. This is precisely why it can serve as such an effective counterpoint to the incongruent violence with which it is often paired. Our eyes are telling us, “you shouldn’t like this, look away.” Our ears are telling us, “yes, you should like this, keep listening.” During the famous helicopter attack in
Apocalypse Now!
Francis Ford Coppola achieved a similar effect by pairing Richard Wagner’s rousing and exhilarating “Ride of the Valkyries” with images of indescribable horror and sadness. This makes us feel on a visceral level that something is terribly wrong. It creates dissonance, rather than harmony. A dissonance we feel in our gut, not our head.