LET ME TELL YOU WHAT QUENTIN TARANTINO'S ABOUT (PART ONE)

One thing you should know about me is that I love me some unity between form and content. Aesthetic symmetry is a fine thing indeed, though it can be extremely frustrating when what one is trying to do is write about a guy who keeps getting distracted and takes forever to get a project done. So it is with my attempts over this past week to write a proper post about Quentin Tarantino.

I've loved movies since I was a little kid, but my obsessive interest in them roughly coincided with Quentin's ascent to stardom. That wasn't an accident, as the first handful of pictures Quentin wrote and/or directed were key in the ignition of that obsessive interest. Although he's gone on to explore other kinds of pictures, part of everyone who was around in the early-to-mid 90s is forever going to associate Quentin with the troika of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction.

Now, with so many years gone by, the vast majority of them spent, by Quentin fans, waiting with increasing frustration for Quentin to get off his fucking ass, take the joint out of his mouth, and make another picture, it's easy to forget how new, fresh, and cool those first three pictures seemed when they first came out. No one before him made pictures the way he did, borrowing this plot element from a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed epic, that transcribed monologue from a 70s documentary, and the other old script a buddy of his had written and crafting, out of that pastiche (Ed. Note: French for “theft”) a feverish pop culture collage that it was simply impossible to stop quoting.

Reservoir Dogs was the picture that made people a couple years older than me want to make movies. For me—the chronically late-to-the-game cautious overthinker—it was Pulp Fiction. Also, typically (and in keeping with Quentin's love for non-sequential narrative), I saw the Holy Quentin Trinity out of order: True Romance first, followed by Reservoir Dogs, concluding with Pulp Fiction.

True Romance was a watershed moment for me as a teenager; I'd already started dipping my toe in the water of international and independent cinema, which involved forcing myself to sit through a whole bunch of shit I was too young to appreciate. Here, in True Romance, was a picture with that independent imprimatur (Warner Bros hid their logo behind shades and a black suit and slapped Quentin's name all over the promotional materials) that was playing in a “normal” movie theater—though thankfully little that happened at the old Metropolitan was actually normal—that made sense, was in English, and had guns and explosions.

Having seen, and loved True Romance, I scrambled to acquire a VHS of Reservoir Dogs so that I could pretend I'd already seen it (I was 14, fuck off). And, with both a sincere and passionate love for True Romance and a burning desire to appear cool, it could be argued that I'd decided to like Reservoir Dogs before I even saw it. But that was all null and void with the opener:

“Let me tell you what Like A Virgin's about. It's all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. Entire song. It's a metaphor for big dicks.”

Even though this was not my introduction to Quentin, it was such a brilliant, characteristic opening volley that it felt like the first picture of his I saw. The opening scene, that famously progresses from the deconstruction of Madonna as size queen to the ethical foundation behind tipping waitresses, had an enormous, lasting, and extremely destructive impact on my own writing (which was then in its wailing, puking infancy). Like—I hope, for selfish reasons—many who saw Quentin's early pictures, I took the wrong lesson away from all those long, apparently meandering dialogue scenes. All I saw was a bunch of guys sitting around looking and sounding fucking awesome.

What I missed was that, in Reservoir Dogs at least, the torrents of verbiage bring something new to the crime movie genre. Movies about criminals and other people getting up to things they'd rather other people didn't know about are all about hiding one's thoughts and intent. Over the history of crime as a literary and cinematic genre, there have been many approaches to the achievement of this end—Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe bought himself time by cracking wise to give himself a moment to think, and also to put forth the appearance of fearlessness (though the brilliance of Marlowe is that he's frequently scared shitless but always maintains). Richard “Donald E. Westlake” Stark's antihero thief/badass Parker kept his business to himself by only saying like five words the whole fucking book; the cinematic equivalent would be Alain Delon in all those Jean-Pierre Melville pictures where he walks around being awesome and smoking cigarettes and then mysteriously gets wasted by the pigs two-and-a-half hours later. Elmore Leonard characters, while gifted and hip conversationalists, were and are still fairly terse when it came/comes to talking business. Quentin's innovation (probably born of his own innate inability to shut the fuck up for five seconds ever) was to have criminals who hid their true intent by talking endlessly about subjects that in no way could compromise their business. Missing this point until about five fucking years ago meant that I wrote an awful lot of really awful shit. But hey, few enough people come to see my plays that the pain inflicted was compartmentalized. (Ed. Note: engraved invitations to the author's pity party are in the mail).

Quentin having his band of thieves talk about shit like Madonna lyrics and the difference between Honey West and Christie Love (and which one, if either, was played by Pam Grier) is the perfect solution, and an example of the artist's personality indelibly imprinting his art: a guy who talks a lot is naturally going to think to himself “I have this bunch of guys brought together in anonymity by a gangster masterminding a diamond heist. They can't know who each other are, lest they be able to tell the cops anything if pinched. So they can't talk about anything personal. What then, do they talk about?” Because seriously, if you've read/seen an interview with Quentin, you know he's not going the Parker/Delon silent route.

The other most interesting thing Quentin does in Reservoir Dogs is the whole “heist movie with no heist” trick. Like everything in Quentin's career, this has inspired thousands of message board flame wars; this is what happens when you become extremely famous at the exact same time as the Internet. The reason, even as a kid, that I liked not showing the heist was that crime pictures in the 80s got very very retarded when it came to the heist scene. Think about it: if you're ripping something off, you want to get it as quickly and quietly as possible. Preferably at night when no one's around, and you have an inside man shutting off the security system and a cocktail party full of people on the other side of town willing to swear—in exchange for a cut of the haul, of course—that you were there the whole time. (Ed. Note: if you ever hear about a massive jewel heist happening on the same night as the New York Innovative Theater Awards, that's where I was, getting drunk with my friends. They'll totally back me up.) You would not, were you pulling a heist, put on ski masks in broad daylight and pull a smash and grab on an armored car, unless you were either monumentally fucking retarded or playing Grand Theft Auto. And they didn't have Grand Theft Auto in the 80s, leaving but one conclusion.

For all Quentin's scruffball populism and fierce disdain for the snootier, elitist side of culture, he still considered his work above the run-of-the-mill dumbass action fare (that he nonetheless undoubtedly smokes lots of weed and watches like a civilized person), and thus the twist. But, again, this was not just a gimmick for flashiness' sake, as it was accused of being. Taking the focus off the big, stupid scene with people flexing their nuts and pointing guns at each other in the middle of a robbery meant there was more time for people to flex their nuts and point guns at each other in private. A fine distinction, perhaps, but consider this: just about the only big-ass heist scene with guns all over the place and suicidal stupidity on the part of the robbers that was not itself irredeemably stupid was the big one near the end of Heat. The only reason it wasn't stupid was because De Niro and retinue were doing something stupid in the story. And even then, that sequence strained verisimilitude a bit far. In Reservoir Dogs, not seeing the heist lets the audience imagine it for themselves (and also, smartly, spares a first-time director the embarrassment of staging something even veteran directors get wrong). And it also puts the focus on the characters.

The confounded expectation of not seeing the heist also ties into the complete reversal of every single first impression of the cast in the first scene: Mr. White lectures Mr. Pink, who refuses to tip, about his disregard for working-class women, making Mr. White seem like a caring, sensitive (comparatively speaking, by gangster standards) sympathetic guy and Mr. Pink like a weaselly little dick. In the end, Mr. White is an overly emotional, ineffectual blowhard and Mr. Pink is the only one of the bunch of them who knows what the fuck he's doing. Mr. Blonde seems like the coolest, most unflappable cat in the city in the opening scene, but leave him alone for five minutes and he's gunning down black teenagers for the hell of it and pouring gasoline on the cop whose ear he just cut off to burn him alive because he's bored. Mr. Blue seems like he's going to be the drawling, ball-busting old-timer who keeps everybody honest but we never see him again after his off-screen death. Mr. Brown has all this insight and then he's blinded by a fatal gunshot wound that kills him (okay, that wasn't much of a reversal, and Mr. Brown is only in the crew so Quentin could be in the movie; moving on). And Mr. Orange, who's just there hanging out not saying much of anything—and unlike everyone else there, “not the world's biggest Madonna fan”—ends up having the most interesting backstory: he's the undercover cop there infiltrating. Joe, the doddering old man trying to remember the name of the girl in his old address book in the first scene, turns out to be sharp as a tack; even though he mistakenly hires an undercover cop on his crew, he still senses the whole time something's not quite right about him. Even Nice Guy Eddie, Joe's son, turns out not to be the competent, affable lug he seems in the beginning, devolving to the point where his last line before being killed is a quavering, blubbering “Stop pointing that fuckin gun at my dad!”

In the end, everybody we've met in the entire movie gets killed except Mr. Pink (whose ultimate fate is slightly ambiguous; the lines in the script where he's off-stage asking the cops not to shoot him are buried in the sound mix if they were even included) and a few cops. More than anything in the movie this owes a debt to the European and East Asian movies that influenced Quentin. The good guy dies a lot more often overseas than he does here, variously due to a societal belief that movies should not show criminals getting away with it or good old fashioned fatalism, depending on the culture. And, interestingly enough with all of Quentin's post-modern, meta-cinematic tendencies, everyone getting killed at the end, whether an homage to Godard, Melville, Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, Beat Takeshi, or whoever, is the most realistic thing in the movie. IRL, when you rip off a diamond wholesaler in broad daylight, the cops will shoot you. And if you save them the extra bullets by killing a couple of the other dudes in your crew first, that's a couple pages less they have to write in their reports and may even be thought a considerate act.

True Romance is considerably more fanciful than Reservoir Dogs, but the reason why is right in the title. It's a romance. Romance has nothing to do with reality. Being in love with someone makes everything feel heightened and vivid at first, which is kind of romantic, and leaves you feeling the absolute impossibility of ever being apart from that person, which is extremely romantic, but the day-to-day reality is shit like, “Oh, man, why do we have to go to your mother's for Thanksgiving, my mom's a better cook.” “Why do you hate my mother?” “I don't hate your mother, she just always overcooks the turkey.” “We can go to your mother's next Thanksgiving, okay?” “Okay.” Etc. etc. Romantic stories are inherently a lie of omission, because they just include the interesting stuff.

Also, let's not forget, True Romance was directed by Tony Scott, the poet laureate of bullshit. Every single movie he's ever made has had some massive pile of bullshit somewhere within (keep in mind, I say that with the utmost respect and love, as you can see here). Whether it's the implication in The Hunger that lesbians look like Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon—trust me, I live in Park Slope, IRL lesbians differ slightly—or the laughable presentation of Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis as a heterosexual couple, or running backs with .45s in their skintight pants that no one sees until the running back starts lighting up tacklers so he'll cover the spread (my personal favorite, and something I'd like to see incorporated into college football to actually make it interesting), Tony Scott movies are proudly full of shit. True Romance is a borderline exception, being not quite as dumb as the rest of the Tony Scott oovra, and in true Quentin fashion, its departures from realism are deliberate and in the service of entertainment.

The True Romance we're all familiar with is not the picture Quentin had in mind when he first wrote it way back in the days. The script, one of his first, has the non-sequential structure that Reservoir Dogs kind of had and Pulp Fiction later famously had, but it doesn't serve any end apparent to anyone other than Quentin. Its origin, as either a collaboration between Quentin and old video store co-worker/friend Roger Avary or a script Avary wrote that Quentin brazenly stole from at every possible opportunity (sources differ), may have led in part to the haphazard structure of the published script. Or it may have been Quentin being a young guy writing his dream first script with all the flourishes and shit he wanted to see on the big screen. Whatever the case was, the ultimate accessibility of True Romance, and its consistently central place in the hearts of my generation, probably owes itself to Tony Scott sitting in the editing room and going, “Hmm, wonder what'll happen if I put this in chronological order?” As declassé as Tony can be at times, I have to call it a wise choice. Hopping around all over the place works sometimes (like in the pictures Quentin directs), and other times it doesn't.

True Romance marks the end of Christian Slater's brief run of relevance and is beyond any possible debate the best movie he was ever in (Ed. Note: Heathers has no third act, Pump Up The Volume turned into a pumpkin in about 1996, Robin Hood was Robin Hood, Interview With The Vampire was insufficiently gay—not that Christian Slater was really even in it—and the entire rest of his career sucked marmoset dick). While that editor's note proved—using the finest, most advanced metrics known to man—the rest of his career was nothing to shake Jack Nicholson's dick at, Christian Slater is fantastically good as a Quentin surrogate in True Romance: just good-looking enough that you can buy Patricia Arquette falling for him, but still scruffy and poorly socialized enough that you can buy him as a nerd of the mind-boggling scale that he needs to be.

Patricia Arquette is perfect as the love of Christian's Slater's life in this. Again, just good-looking enough that you can buy her as the woman of his dreams but just flawed enough that you can buy her falling for a choad who works in a comic-book store. This isn't meant to be mean, but Patricia Arquette's fucked-up teeth are what make her performance. It's not like her acting isn't good (it is pretty good), but the part needs a really good-looking girl with something just a little off. And fucked-up teeth were the perfect thing, because when she smiles like a love-struck goofball at Christian Slater, the fact that her teeth are all fucked up is kind of adorable. Much like Jennifer Grey getting that nose job, Patricia Arquette getting her teeth fixed ended up being kind of a bad career move; afterward she was still attractive and a reasonably good actress, but that initial je ne sais quois we all fell for was gone. However, we'll always have True Romance.

The rest of the cast is standing room only character actor gods. Dennis Hopper is Christian Slater's recovering alcoholic/amateur historian father. Christopher Walken (genuflect) shows up and legendarily brings it (and it should be said, the line from the trailer “I haven't killed anyone [gunshot] since nineteen eighty-fwah” was what made me say “This movie is getting seen come hell or high water”). Samuel L. Jackson has an amusing cameo as shotgun fodder. Gary Oldman forever set the bar for zipper down, dick out, scenery-masticating Gary Oldman performances: he has fucking dreadlocks. And says the n-word (in grand, facepalm Quentin tradition) about a thousand times. And, of course, introduced the world to the concept of White Boy Day.

“He must have thought it was White Boy Day. [slightly worried] It ain't White Boy Day, is it?”
“Naw, it ain't White Boy Day.”

Christian Slater eventually panics and, thinking that Gary Oldman is going to be so awesome that no one remembers him in any of the reviews, lights him up and accidentally steals the suitcase full of cocaine that Gary Oldman stole from Samuel L. Jackson. And thus, we have the perfect Quentin Tarantino MacGuffin. A suitcase full of cocaine. Did Quentin save the suitcase and do all the coke in it while writing the script to Kill Bill? We may never know.

However, once Gary Oldman is dead, many others start stealing scenes from our intrepid hero. Michael Rapaport does his dumb goofball routine as Christian Slater's old buddy who's hoping beyond hope to get cast on a reboot of T.J. Hooker (note cultural prescience, foretelling the wave of reboots that would consume Hollywood in its ravenous maw in coming years). His roommate, though, may very well turn in the best, most memorable performance in the movie. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Brad Pitt.

“Get some beer . . . and some cleaning products.”
“Don't condescend to me, man . . . fuckin kill you, man . . .”
“They're at the Safari Motel Inn, the Safari Motor . . . Safari Motel.”
“So you go . . . you go down . . . hey, you guys wanna smoke a bowl? [the gangsters all rack their shotguns] Oh . . . okay, well you go down and you keep drivin and you keep drivin!”

I doubt I will ever laugh as hard as I did the first time I saw Brad Pitt smoking weed out of one of those bear-shaped honey bottles while blasting Soundgarden. Your naysayers will sniff “Well, he's not really acting, everyone knows Brad Pitt's a giant pothead.” But fuck that shit; first of all, the rumors that Brad Pitt smokes weed all the time are scurrilous and the only people who can prove them are all the people he smokes weed with (and potheads have shitty memories). Second of all, if you were Brad Pitt, wouldn't you smoke weed? He's been able to get the best shit in the world for like ever. Third, as someone who has tried to act while stoned, I can tell you, it's really, really, really hard. Fourth, trying to act stoned while you are stoned will make your head explode. Fifth, since we've established that since Brad Pitt was not acting while stoned because his head is still in one piece, we can only conclude that he was in fact not stoned while playing the part of the single most stoned character in the history of cinema. And thus, ladies and gentlemen, we have demonstrative proof: it is a fine, fine performance. You can do all the character work you want, and draw your motivation for every single beat from your own life experience, but you can't teach timing, and Brad's timing is fucking supernatural as Floyd. Every pause is perfect. Every ellipsis. Every gesture.

The awesome doesn't stop there. The guy Michael Rapaport finds to buy the suitcase full of coke is Bronson Pinchot—I think this was the movie where I realized he wasn't actually European—on behalf of movie producer Saul Rubinek (“Hey, choose a fuckin' lane. Wha—DON'T GIVE ME THE FINGER! I'LL FUCKIN' HAVE YOU KILLED!”). Both are tremazing.

Tom Sizemore and Chris Penn play a couple cops, lovingly drawn from the tradition of 70s and 80s cop shows and movies, who report to Ed Lauter. When Bronson Pinchot get busted with a hooker, who smashes a big bag of coke all over his face, Sizemore/Penn bust him and convince him to be a witness, and they go in to inform Lieutenant Lauter of their good fortune, and that they will be able to bust Saul Rubinek. Of course, being a Quentin movie, this is how they explain who he is:

Chris Penn: He did that movie, Comin' Home In A Body Bag?
Ed Lauter: Vietnam movie?
Chris Penn: Yeah.
Ed Lauter: (beat) Good fuckin' movie.
Chris Penn: Fuckin A.
Tom Sizemore: Great fuckin' movie.

The way Ed Lauter says “Good fuckin movie” has always, for some reason, just destroyed me. If some silly bastard ever lets me do a Siskel & Ebert type TV show, instead of “thumbs up” I'm saying “good fuckin movie” in my best Ed Lauter impression whenever something rules sufficiently.

(Minor aside: This is a universe where a movie called Comin' Home In A Body Bag won multiple Oscars. If you need it explained to you why this is awesome, you're on the wrong fuckin blog, my friend.)

Then, lest we forget, there's also James Gandolfini, back when he was just “oh, wow, that guy.” He had a good enough string in his pre-Tony Soprano years that after a while he became sort of like the Italian Luis Guzman to me (Ed. Note: This is pre-“Luis Guzman” Luis Guzman we're talkin about; before PT Anderson introduced him to civilians). And say what you will about Quentin as a writer, there is no getting around the fact that the boy writes a good fuckin' psycho:

“Now the first time you kill somebody, that's the hardest. I don't give a shit if you're fuckin' Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. Remember that guy in Texas? The guy up in that fuckin' tower that killed all them people? I'll bet you green money that first little black dot he took a bead on, that was the bitch o' the bunch. First one is tough, no fuckin' foolin'. The second one . . . the second one ain't no fuckin' Mardi Gras either, but it's better than the first one 'cause you still feel the same thing, y'know . . . except it's more diluted, y'know, it's . . . it's better. I trew up on the first one, you believe that? Then the third one . . . the third one is easy, you level right off. It's no problem. Now . . . shit . . . now I do it just to watch their fuckin' expression change.”

The scene where James Gandolfini gives a crunched, bloody Patricia Arquette that speech really shook me up the first time I saw True Romance. It had, up til that point, been this cool, sexy, stylish lark where like people got lit up and called each other the n-word even though they were white and Val Kilmer showed up as Elvis to give Christian Slater pep talks and there was all that flashy Tony Scott camerawork and then suddenly we're in this vividly terrifying scene where I was half convinced James Gandolfini was going to rape, torture, and kill Patricia Arquette, and I was not entirely sure it would be in that order. It's long enough and graphic enough that it lingers even after it's over, lending an air of needed uncertainty to the coming drug deal.

Our heroes show up to sell Saul Rubinek the coke, with the cops all over the place, waiting to pounce, and a whole bunch of gangsters (among them the mighty Frank Adonis, Victor Argo, Paul Ben-Victor, and Kevin Corrigan) on their way in to kill everyone and get their coke back. Thus, the trademarked, copyrighted, watermarked, cattle branded Tony Scott shootout. Now, Tony Scott shootouts are always awesome, and this one is no different, but I have never been able to figure out where all those fucking feathers came from. I mean, yes, they look cool, but did each cop and each gangster bring their own personal down pillow to fire their guns through?

In a blatant nod to commercialism, this time only almost everyone gets killed. Michael Rapaport escapes unscathed, and Christian Slater takes one in the face and appears dead, until Roger Avary saves the day with an uncredited rewrite (Quentin refused to change the ending, telling Tony Scott “Fuck you, you bought the script, you rewrite it.”) and had him only lose an eye, thus leading to the cute happy ending where Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, and their son Elvis frolic on the beach while Christian Slater wears an eye patch. Again, like Tony Scott's other apparent commercial whore instinct changes, this one changes the movie for the better. Sure, not every movie needs to have a happy ending, but this one did.

And so we come to the announcement that Quentin's next picture, that he'd again be directing, would be called Pulp Fiction. But first, the other script he sold before Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, would be released, in heavily altered form. All this and more in Part Two!