Now, May We Talk About Quentin?

Some of us told y'all to watch ya boy.

So many folks are through with Quentin Tarantino over his vile behavior toward Uma Thurman on the set of Kill Bill. There is no more separating the art from the artist. That's the line, and you crossed it, dawg. If that's you, well then, get over here! Come sit with those of us who were done after we heard the dialogue in Reservoir Dogs about Madonna fucking niggers and therefore soiling herself too much to be of any use to a real man, read WHITE MAN. My own personal being-done-with-his-assness was reinforced when I was sitting in a darkened theater, giving him another chance, just to hear "Do I look like dead nigger storage?" Almost as if Tarantino could anticipate those of us in the theater looking at one-another, silently mouthing "da hell??," he delivers the line again, insisting the powerful Jules answer him, and likely informing those of us in the audience we heard him right. Samuel L. is directed to have his blackness on ten—all the way up—until Tarantino's no-acting ass deflates Jules, rendering him into a slew-footed, shuffling, deferent living nigger to the offending dead-niggers with which he continually inconveniences Tarantino's Jimmie.

The manner in which Pulp Fiction builds up Jules into a supernaturally frightening force for retribution, just to be humiliated and emasculated by a character played by the director himself is some serious hand-tipping on the part of its creator. This is before the other supernaturally vengeful Negro Marcellus is literally emasculated a few frames later. Why does Ving Rhames's Marcellus end his pursuit of Bruce Willis' Butch? On the unspoken trade that he'll keep silent about Marcellus's anal rape. His dogged determination to destroy Butch for double-crossing him is completely dissipated by the threat of everyone finding out he took it up the rear-end from another man and had to be saved by a white man he just so happens to own. Tarantino lives for putting black men in their place in the most viscerally-humiliating ways. His black women are layered, nuanced, complicated, beautiful, and deadly if pushed too far. Generally, deadly for black men. Perhaps he doesn't appear in the cast of Jackie Brown and Kill Bill because they're his proxies. I dunno. That's too hefty an analysis for writing no one asked me for.

When a director casts himself in a small but significant role, it's a statement about the consciousness the filmmaker intends to impart. M. Night Shyamalan casts himself in moments where he wants to hand us the twist before we arrive at it on our own, obviously to reinforce he's smarter than his audience, therefore we should trust him and relax. Tarantino casts himself when his black characters need to be deflated and revealed as weaker than white men. Me, I knew when Phil LaMarr's Marvin appeared what to expect. The guy's speech and mannerisms were far too white socially normative for it not to be some statement by the guy who wrote a debate about interracial relationships and white purity into the first ten minutes of his debut feature film. A debate that was a complete and total non-sequitur to the overall proceedings. Once the well-spoken, chill, affable, harmless Marvin is flat-blasted by Jules, that caricature of black virility complete with outdated Jheri curl, it's up to Quentin Tarantino himself to bring Jules to heel. I don't want to hear shit about Orson Welles casting himself instead of Joseph Cotton in "Touch of Evil," if you abide that nonsense.

Plenty of journalists made a living unpacking and assessing Tarantino's apparent anti-blackness, equally lambasting and defending his bigoted bullshit. Some of these defenders are black, in the case of Desiree Bowie, who, in a 2015 Salon piece titled (in part) "It’s not easy being a black Tarantino fan," wrote:

But I appreciated his films as much as I disagreed with his opinions. I never viewed Tarantino’s movies as anti-Black or grossly exploitative. To be honest, I don’t cringe when n-bombs get dropped in his movies because I feel as though I do understand his intentions.

Bowie musters the ability to compartmentalize Tarantino's anti-blackness because it's chiefly directed at black men and, when contrasted against his mature and admiring portrayals of black women onscreen, it's obvious his issue isn't with black folk, per say. I haven't been able to find an update from her about Tarantino's off-screen personal and professional misogyny, bullying and abuse. I looked.

That same year, Nicole Silverberg's piece in GQ titled "Maybe Skip What Quentin Tarantino Said to The New York Times" parsed all the ways QT plays himself out in bold-headed paragraphs such as 'TV is shit,' 'Tarantino is a Culture Savior,' and 'Backlash from black critics is annoying and doesn't matter.' Under that last tidbit, she writes:

"Though I'm sure Ellis would despair at my use of that word as part of the "language policing" he so detests, the truth is that Tarantino is coming just one step short of crying "reverse racism." He's doing the equivalent of "but why can't I say the n-word?" except that, oh wait, Tarantino has his characters say it 110 times in Django Unchained. Tarantino is saying, "Well, if I end up making movies that only white people enjoy, oh well!" and that sucks."

Sucks to be sure, and thanks for bringing that up, but why skip what he said? Why do we skip evidence he's that dude? Why do we forgive his anti-blackness to uphold his genius? Why doesn't the quality that compels his fans and admirers to shrug off the ways he uses his films and platform to arrest and antagonize black folk and excoriate his limited view of blackness not help him achieve exoneration over his abuse of Uma Thurman? I haven't been able to find anything from Silverberg covering this new flap against Tarantino. The indictment should most certainly stick. Physical harm, intimidation, and abuse of the trust she gave him is nothing short of dehumanization. I just wasn't the least bit surprised. I'm also not surprised many of his defenders and apologizers aren't writing follow-ups.

Tarantino's resentful bigotry and anti-blackness played out for all to see. Doubled and tripled down upon in all his interviews. Its pathologies played out on screen and in print to much acclaim.  Once Uma Thurman finally told the truth about his vile behavior, folks are shocked. Betrayed, even. But why? He kicked your neighbor, right in front of you. Time and again, he tipped his hand to his urge to dehumanize and marginalize others. There wasn't a black man in Pulp Fiction that wasn't broken by him. Why would he spare Uma? Sorry, but oh yes it is the very same thing. It is not a different problem. It's the underbelly to the overall problem, akin to the extreme metaphor of serial killer Jeffery Dahmer, who trapped and mutilated small animals as he worked his way up to trapping and mutilating small humans. In this case, Dahmer's small animals are the fictional black men Tarantino created just to torture and humiliate. Seems like he was working his way up to torturing and humiliating an actual human, who is blonde and beautiful and powerful and kick-ass. Just like Madonna, who had absolutely nothing to do with the plot of Reservoir Dogs, but an ad-libbed debate about her making love with Big Daddy Kane somehow made its way into that modern classic.

Perhaps now I don't have to walk out of the bar when peers bring up Tarantino's brilliance at the next writing conference. Perhaps we finally understand the folly of deferring exemplified bigotry as a problem that doesn't affect everyone. I mean, sure one can, but when we learn about the Uma Thurmans, we wonder why and how.

Then someone like me, for whom his blackness is a mounting inconvenience to his peers, points out the Madonna debate in Reservoir Dogs gave us every indication what QT holds in his psyche for blonde white women of personal power and self-determination.

Those of us who refuse to resolve and excuse his bigotry in order to enjoy the zeitgeist-influencing pop culture moments of his films weren't surprised at his misogyny and abuse. Bigotry isn't a personality quirk. It's an indicator of the risk of deeper depravity. Perhaps we're all finding a way to come to terms with the truth that separating the art from the artist sets us up for these letdowns. We ignored, excused, and justified his abject racism, eventually praising him for his uncompromising insistence upon doing what he wanted. We watched his depictions of black Americans and listened as he told us to go to hell if we don't like it. If you weren't black, it wasn't your problem. If you were black, but you loved being in with the in-crowd, you subordinated your problem and went to see those films anyhow. Maybe even wrote about them. As a result, he became more popular, and more powerful, eventually leading to his injustice against Uma Thurman. In fact, I find it completely upends the image of women's empowerment she worked so hard to give us. I can't think of The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo without thinking of what happened behind the scenes. It undercuts the value of the portrayal when the performance was wrenched from someone rendered so powerless.

I wonder if now I won't have to find a way to slink off to other environs when conversations turn to Quentin Tarantino at this year's crime fiction conferences. I'll save that energy for when I have to dart away as James Ellroy's shit is laughed off and explained away as lunacy and LA Confidential is upheld as a hallmark of modern film noir. Where I'm from, bring it up and you'll get "Oh, you mean that flick where they put the gun in the young black man's mouth like he's sucking on something big and black in order to get him to confess to a crime? That one where the brothas are in a cell crying and begging for mercy so the white LA cops can get a jones? Dood from Gladiator was in it back when he wasn't fat? Naw, I ain't watchin' that shit."

Twenty-Five Years of Reservoir Dogs

When I was in junior high we had a small, family owned video store around the corner called U.E.P. Video. I never knew what it stood for, but I'd regularly get a few bucks from my mom to go down and rent a video. There was never any real restriction on what we watched (though, I suppose my mom would have put her foot down on porn), so the small store was full of possibilities. My uncle has recommended From Dusk Till Dawn to my parents and we watched it together. He didn't mention it was a vampire movie, and none of us had seen the previews that made it clear. It was a huge, fabulous surprise. At least, for me. My parents hated it.

The internet was young back then. Only two or three people I knew had it at home, and it seemed like the majority of the internet was shitty message boards and porn we didn't even want to see (and weird shit edited to get through the parental filters, and absolutely no such thing as "Safe Search"). But even then, if you typed "Quentin Tarantino" or "Robert Rodriguez" into a search engine, you could find out what other movies they made.

Armed with a few bucks and new knowledge, I went down to U.E.P. to rent Reservoir Dogs.

They wouldn't let me.

Now, I had rented R rated movies before, I'm sure of it. This was before you had to have an ID or parental chaperone to see R rated movies in the theater. People generally guessed that parents would do whatever parents do, and kids would probably find ways around it, and R rated movies couldn't hurt anyone too badly or require too much therapy in adulthood. But they wouldn't let me rent Reservoir Dogs. I was fucking pissed. I called my mom at work to tell her about this grave injustice, told her that now U.E.P. said she would have to sign some waiver letting me rent R rated movies or that she would have to rent them for me. And just what the hell was I supposed to do today between finishing homework and my parents getting home? How was I going to relish these beautiful hours when no one was fighting over the TV (I always lost).

My mom went down to U.E.P. on her way home from work to sign the waiver and pick the movie up. I got a call from the store, my mom on the other line, "What was the movie you wanted? River Rats?"

I corrected her, and she got the movie for me. I had to wait until the next day to watch it, because by that time of day, I was on the losing side of every argument about what would be on TV. The next day, I guess my mom was at work because I remember what happened so clearly.

I was watching Reservoir Dogs (for the second time), and my mom was standing behind the sectional listening to Tarantino's Mr. Brown give his theory on the song "Live A Virgin." Right after he says, "Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick" my mom took a deep breath, like she wanted to say something, and then shook her head. "I was going to make a comment about the language in this movie but I guess it's not any worse than what you hear in your own living room." She walked out.

I don't remember buying it, but I must have because I saw it easily fifty times that year in between sampling all of Tarantino's movies and dipping into Robert Rodriguez's oeuvre as well. I had the most fun showing them to my dad who loved crime movies and had no reservations about watching Tarantino wax philosophical about big dicks with me sitting next to him. As strained and tumultuous as my relationship with my dad was, we could always have a good time with Tarantino or Rodriguez. Always.

So it's the 25th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs. I haven't got to watch it again this week because I've got a sick kid at home who isn't sleeping at her regular times and I'm zonked by the time I get her to bed, but I could probably recite the movie from first line to end line (including Mr. Pink begging for mercy outside the warehouse at the end). I told my brother recently that Reservoir Dogs was always going to be my favorite movie because it's been my favorite movie for so long. There's so many memories attached to it, it opened so many ideas for me. I know it's maybe a little ironic, being the outspoken feminist, and citing the one Tarantino film were not a single woman exists in the foreground as my favorite, but it is what it is. It fascinated me, it gripped me. The dialogue lit me up (I was already experimenting with writing novels by then), and everything about it was exciting. It held up to second, third, and thirtieth viewings. Even now, all these years later, I find new and different things to love about the story, about the way it's shot, about how fucking insane Michael Madsen is as Mr. Blonde.

I Like the Way You Die.

I could watch Tim Roth die all day.

Not  because I hate him, it's just that he's so damn good at it.

We all have our talents and his is dying in interesting, engaging ways.

I've watched him die at least 125 times in Reservoir Dogs alone. It's the kind of skill you don't really think of as a skill until you see someone knock it out of the park. It's like Elmore Leonard with dialogue. I know he said he just wrote the way people talked, but no one I've ever met sounds half as cool as his characters. His immense talent was writing mind blowing dialogue so well that you just believed people talked that way, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Hemingway's great talent was saying a whole lot with very little. Stephen King's talent is saying a whole hell of a lot, but doing it well enough that you don't mind. Alissa Nutting's talent is titillating and revolting the reader in a single sentence. Chuck Palahniuk's talent is being Chuck Palahniuk - which maybe doesn't sound like much until you read a writer who's really trying very hard to be Chuck Palahniuk, and failing. 

Going back to movies for a second - Tarantino's talent is making you root for the good guys and the bag guys at the same time. You want Mr. Orange out alive, but you also want the jewel thieves to get away. Robert Rodriguez's talent is reversing the trope-y coding (example, in El Mariachi, the blonde man in the white hat is the villain, and the hero is dressed in black). 

Now more than ever, a writer has to have some special talent, some knack for something we didn't realize people had knacks for, to get attention in the big world of writing. This brings up an obvious question - what's my secret talent? Shit, I don't know. I don't have nearly enough time for an existential crisis, so I guess I'll write my way to that discovery. But it is fun and interesting to look at different writers (and actors, because seriously, no one dies as engagingly as Tim Roth) to see what they do that no one else seems to do as well. I think sometimes the greats are doing something the rest of us didn't even realize needed doing.

So go out there and do whatever you do better than anyone else. Even if it's just dying.