examines the differences between the rooted and the rootless. Ultimately it's the fellow travelers who are able to overcome Stuntman Mike. I'm not with you on the shift in sympathies from the first part to the second.
Stuntman Mike suffers in the second half, but I found his suffering mostly comical and pretty schematic, honestly -- a comment that isn't mean to take anything away from Russell's performance, which I think is extraordinary. I just mean that the whole "payback" thing in the second half feels to me. The movie's structure is intriguing -- in some ways it reminds me of , which starts out establishing a sympathetic female protagonist that you think is going to be your surrogate through the movie, then has a psychopathic murderer off her at roughly the halfway mark.
Here we've got a whole carload of Janet Leighs, and an Anthony Perkins with broad shoulders, a killer smile and death-proof car who ultimately gets done in by some tough dames who are just as physically skilled and fearless as he is, ultimately more so. But there's a problem here, for me, and it's that Tarantino established both sets of women as people, real people, so vividly that when they suddenly turned into standard babes-on-a-rampage, and the whole thing turned into a cartoon, it felt like a regression. I'm probably in the minority on this, but for me the single most extraordinary scene in that movie was the long take of Rosario Dawson and company in that restaurant shooting the shit.
The choice of camera move -- the slowly rotating 360 degree tracking shot -- is an auteur's cliche that everyone from Arthur Penn to Brian De Palma to Woody Allen has used, and I kind of hoped I wouldn't see it again, but then Tarantino breathed new life into it, and really used it to observe these characters. I felt like I was sitting at that table. It was also the first time that I ever looked at Rosario Dawson and saw an idiosyncratic person there, as opposed to a beautiful camera subject.
That life force you talked about earlier in our conversation really came through in how Tarantino photographed her -- in the energy he drew out of her. I know what you mean about Dawson, though my girl is Sydney Poitier's Jungle Julia. When she's twirling her hair in the bar to Smith's "Baby, it's You", I'm just in heaven.
Now that said, I do think the character switcheroo you point out -- where the latter group of girls become "superheroines" -- is set up and prepared for. The way they make fun of the cheerleader girl (and how they leave her behind with the lecherous hillbilly) is particularly deplorable, but true to who I think these girls are: attractive empty shells, who we do, perversely, feel for. I chalk this up to their charisma, their way with QT's dialogue.
I think the clincher in the switcheroo is Rosario Dawson's close-up where her face goes from fear to elation all of an instant. As I remarked in a comments thread, this rhymes with the final shot of Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" where she's riding off with her daughter. It treads a fine line between spiritualism and fetishism; clarity and insanity.
It's all these things at once and we ask, I think, that question you say you yourself so often ask with Tarantino (and are kind of hurt by when someone asks it of Wes Anderson), "Is he serious?" I think Tarantino's more serious than he's given credit for being, and perhaps more serious than he knows. I also think he's torn between being true to expectations of Tarantino and exploring aspects of his talent that are often thought of as something one just has to put up with in order to get to the "fun" stuff.
That long take conversation is one such example. The first half of was striking because of how it pushed toward stylization, but stayed in some kind of recognizable reality, geographic and emotional. Tarantino's movies are often set in a kind of fantastic everyday universe, like comic books that would be sold on the same shelf alongside Harvey Pekar and R.
Crumb, and probably Frank Miller, too. But I felt he attained a degree of real-world weight in that first half, and in the quieter scenes in the second half, that I'd never seen him attempt before, except in parts of , and I was intrigued by that. For once, the Rohmer connection seemed to me more concrete than abstract.
I found myself marveling at how Tarantino objectified, but also humbled himself before, the sheer physicality, the femininity, of his actresses. It's revealing that when Stuntman Mike makes his big play, he's kneeling. I thought Tarantino might actually be the right director for an adaptation of Tropic of Cancer Something in his tone had that attitude, that very heterosexually male but at the same time lyrical and helplessly enthralled way of looking at women.
Some of the shots -- particularly that slow track up Jungle Julia's raindrop-speckled leg on the porch -- had the granite sensuality of a Bob Dylan lyric. That stuff was so good, so daring for Tarantino, that the car chases and the final beatdown felt like QT giving the people what they want, and what the Ain't-It-Cool geek inside Tarantino always craves. I think the boldest thing he could have done in order to really throw the entire grindhouse genre into sharp relief was to continue in the same vein he'd been exploring, and shock us with real anger, real pain, and shatter the same tropes he'd been setting up.
But he couldn't bring himself to do that. I fear he loves trash too much to transform it utterly. It'd be like repudiating where he came from, the movies that made him who he is.
And I believe there is real pain in that ending, which -- like Tsai Ming-liang does with a pornographic vernacular in -- plays out as a grindhouse film on the surface while raising all sorts of troubling questions beneath. The villain is the victim; the first half resonates with the second half to complete the portrait. I don't doubt that Tarantino has a give-people-what-they-want mentality, but I also think he trusts his instincts to lead him, and realizes his subconscious will take him places contradictory to his public persona.
I believe the work of art always betrays its creator. QT is no mere fanboy, but I don't know if he'd ever be able to express how deep and intuitive I think he is. Which maybe gives me a reason to exist.
Didn't it bother you that Tarantino had established very real characters with real emotions, then sent them on this crazy revenge mission that didn't jibe -- at least for me -- with what he'd established earlier? I didn't believe that women this real, this well-rounded, would be going after a homicidal maniac in such a cavalier, let's-get-him-girls kind of way. It was as if characters in a documentary suddenly decided, "From now on, we're going to act like stereotypical grindhouse babes.
" The Zoë character, for instance, is utterly believable as a stuntwoman who seeks danger for a living and because she loves it, but the context for that behavior is clear; she tests herself within her own limits. I didn't believe that she'd endanger herself in that way and turn into a super-avenger on a dime. She had too much at stake, and there were too many imponderables.
This plays into the Borges quote about unreality. I thought the world Tarantino created was so much more real that what you usually see in a grindhouse movie -- except maybe one directed by Monte Hellman, who was more arthouse at heart anyway -- that when it became unreal, I didn't believe it. And I did, because I believe that switch was entirely prepared for.
To come back to your parallel I think the first group of girls are Janet Leigh, the second group Vera Miles and John Gavin. Like Hitchcock, Tarantino subtly shifts our sympathies until we identify more with the monster than with the "heroes." I find his rhyming structure (sticking with the girls in both sections) to be quite audacious.
And while the ending plays triumphant, I think it's actually calculated to create some underlying disturbance, sort of like De Palma's end to , which I read as tragic, even as I'm cheering John Cassavetes getting blown sky-high. It comes back again to what I'm saying about the rooted vs. the rootless.
The second group of girls are Hollywood types, jumping between places, really no sense of the world even though they've traveled it (I'd say this is, in part, a sly QT rebuke to his critics). Tarantino is more interested in the Austin girls (as am I, quite honestly) because they are rooted, not just in a place, but in a genuine artistic pursuit. The telling line for me is when Jungle Julia says that she and her friends are not really fighting.
She admits to the mask that she puts on in public. I love the moment when she's talking to the pot dealer on the phone, asks "Where are you?!
!" in ultimate high bitch mode. The record player comes on.
She moves alone to a back room and then softens...
"Where are you?" Then the text message aside (scored to the love theme from ), which just kills me, I love it so. And the way Julia holds Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) at the end of the night, apologizing to her for the whole lapdance situation.
There's genuine feeling between them, where I think the second group of girls are always superficial, make bad choices (as Chaw says in his review), and it's only when Stuntman Mike shows up that we realize why the disparity. The second part is about him -- monster by night, all-too-human by day. Here's where I haul out an accusation that's often leveled at me -- the movie you're describing is much greater than the movie I saw.
There was so much potential in , much of it realized and much more unrealized -- that it reminded me of another Pauline Kael quote, from her review of examines the differences between the rooted and the rootless.
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