RESERVOIR DOGS
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen
Released in 1992
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen
Released in 1992
Quentin Tarantino made his fame with Pulp Fiction in 1994. Yet the first I'd ever heard of him was as a screenwriter just a bit later that same year. He'd come up with the story for what turned out to be the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I remember being in the theatre and feeling a little amazed as some people walked out during the first ten minutes. In NBK, the concept of "gratuitous" violence loses all context as the camera follows a spinning butcher knife in slow motion while it crashes through a diner window and slices deeply into the back of a fleeing cowboy. The camera hovers directly behind a discharged bullet that spins in mid air before accelerating into the brain of a waitress. Woody Harrelson slashes off an old man's finger and tells him that it isn't nice to point. Everyone in the audience, I feel safe in saying, was disturbed by this seemingly cavalier, mocking attitude toward severe cruelty. Some people decided not to endorse the concepts by sticking around for them. My friend Barb Carlton and I did stick around. After the movie we went to a diner and talked about the film for at least two hours. The movie was saying something about violence, we assured one another. The nasty real life media used sensational scenes from horrific circumstances to feed junk food to the brain and Tarantino and Stone were bashing the media's balls with bricks. That's what Barb and I decided.
What I decided, on my own, slowly and with time, is that Tarantino, however much he denies plagiarism and however much he insists that what he does is to pay homage, what he actually is is a very smart guy who has been absorbing cinematic influences his entire life and the sponge which is his brain soaked up most of its influences from the 1970s. Now, here's the thing: Everybody steals ideas from anybody whose ideas are worth stealing. As Michelangelo is reported to have said, "Where I steal, I leave a knife." I'm not comparing the writer-director of Reservoir Dogs to the painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I am saying that whatever thievery we may suspect Tarantino has had a hand in, most of the time he has excelled where those to whom he "pays homage" have merely tinkered.
I give you The Killing, by Stanley Kubrick, a movie to which Reservoir Dogs is often quite properly compared. The former film came out in 1956 and good as the movie was, Kubrick was still learning his craft at that point and it would be four more years before he actually came out with his first great film, Spartacus. If Tarantino lifted ideas from The Killing, he did more with them than his predecessor.
One of the things that sets Tarantino apart from hack writer-directors is that he has ideas and he knows how to convey them. The story for Dogs is not that complex. What is complex is the telling of it. To offer an example of the brilliance: Tim Roth plays an undercover cop. He is learning how to do this job from his supervisor. The supervisor tells him that he needs to learn how to tell a "commode story." We follow Roth around while he practices working up the story that he will eventually use to convince the bad guys that he is as legitimately crooked as they are. He practices the story until he can do it like a man telling a favorite joke. Then, even though the joke is just a big lie, we follow Roth into the bathroom where the nonexistent story never really happened. That idea, my friends, has genius just sweating rivers off it.
The storytelling in Reservoir Dogs is what they like to call nonlinear. That means that it jumps around a bit and doesn't hang on sequencing. Sometimes the film goes off in one direction and lingers there for far longer than we've been conditioned to expect. This idea is right out of the 1970s. I'm thinking particularly of the Woody Allen film Annie Hall. In fact, I could go on all night about all the different influences from the 1970s that help make up this movie and if you've seen the referent points there's a good chance you would agree with me. However, it might be more interesting to look at things a little differently. For example, just the idea of having the villains be the focal point of the movie goes right back to some of the original blaxploitation flicks, such as Superfly and Sweet Badass. That's a little ironic considering the racism of the white guys in Dogs.
The 1970s kicked down the door in introducing streams of endless profanity, horrible violence, anti-heroes, and classical conditioning. Tarantino nicely lifts the fallen door back onto its rusty hinges and then blasts the fucker to smithereens with a rocket launcher.
Excuse me? What did I mean by my reference to classical conditioning? Oh, I'll be happy to explain. Remember how in A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick (again, I know, again) has Alex the anti-hero condition the writer whose wife is raped to have painful flashbacks whenever he hears the song "Singing in the Rain"? Well, the audience gets conditioned the same way. I guarantee you that anyone who ever saw Clockwork thinks of it when they hear the Gene Kelly tune. So guess what? Yep. Tarantino pulls a real Kubrick on the audience by staging some kind of linking device through the scenes in the form of a 1970s flashback radio station that plays hits from that decade. So whenever we hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" today, we flash on the torture scene in the warehouse. And that's not an accident and it isn't paying homage to anybody. It's a thievery and a damned imaginative thievery at that.
I am absolutely not here to act as an apologist for Quentin Tarantino. Neither am I here to make his case for sainthood. I am here to say that with Reservoir Dogs (1992), his first major film, he offered audiences something that had been missing from American movies for more than a while. He made them visually compelling. He made them emotionally exciting. And he made them smart. When Messers White and Pink are arguing about what went wrong during the jewel heist, they speak as men who possess a type of surprising street sophistication regarding their chosen occupation. It doesn't matter whether a gang of jewel thieves could actually be this analytic. What matters is that the gang in this movie is.
I think what bothered some people (Roger Ebert comes to mind) about this movie is not so much that Tarantino went over the line with the profanity and the violence. Clearly he did and in the process created a profane and violent gem. What bothers some critics, I think, is their fear that unscrupulous hacks will come along and snatch up influences from Tarantino the way Tarantino did from directors such as Kubrick and DePalma, the latter having stolen his entire oeuvre from Alfred Hitchcock. Well, people are going to do that and I'm sure they have. But the good news is that somewhere there was a kid who watched Reservoir Dogs when it came out on DVD and started really thinking about the ideas of this movie. A kid with talent. A kid who works in a video store. Or for Netflix. And he has this idea. . .
What I decided, on my own, slowly and with time, is that Tarantino, however much he denies plagiarism and however much he insists that what he does is to pay homage, what he actually is is a very smart guy who has been absorbing cinematic influences his entire life and the sponge which is his brain soaked up most of its influences from the 1970s. Now, here's the thing: Everybody steals ideas from anybody whose ideas are worth stealing. As Michelangelo is reported to have said, "Where I steal, I leave a knife." I'm not comparing the writer-director of Reservoir Dogs to the painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I am saying that whatever thievery we may suspect Tarantino has had a hand in, most of the time he has excelled where those to whom he "pays homage" have merely tinkered.
I give you The Killing, by Stanley Kubrick, a movie to which Reservoir Dogs is often quite properly compared. The former film came out in 1956 and good as the movie was, Kubrick was still learning his craft at that point and it would be four more years before he actually came out with his first great film, Spartacus. If Tarantino lifted ideas from The Killing, he did more with them than his predecessor.
One of the things that sets Tarantino apart from hack writer-directors is that he has ideas and he knows how to convey them. The story for Dogs is not that complex. What is complex is the telling of it. To offer an example of the brilliance: Tim Roth plays an undercover cop. He is learning how to do this job from his supervisor. The supervisor tells him that he needs to learn how to tell a "commode story." We follow Roth around while he practices working up the story that he will eventually use to convince the bad guys that he is as legitimately crooked as they are. He practices the story until he can do it like a man telling a favorite joke. Then, even though the joke is just a big lie, we follow Roth into the bathroom where the nonexistent story never really happened. That idea, my friends, has genius just sweating rivers off it.
The storytelling in Reservoir Dogs is what they like to call nonlinear. That means that it jumps around a bit and doesn't hang on sequencing. Sometimes the film goes off in one direction and lingers there for far longer than we've been conditioned to expect. This idea is right out of the 1970s. I'm thinking particularly of the Woody Allen film Annie Hall. In fact, I could go on all night about all the different influences from the 1970s that help make up this movie and if you've seen the referent points there's a good chance you would agree with me. However, it might be more interesting to look at things a little differently. For example, just the idea of having the villains be the focal point of the movie goes right back to some of the original blaxploitation flicks, such as Superfly and Sweet Badass. That's a little ironic considering the racism of the white guys in Dogs.
The 1970s kicked down the door in introducing streams of endless profanity, horrible violence, anti-heroes, and classical conditioning. Tarantino nicely lifts the fallen door back onto its rusty hinges and then blasts the fucker to smithereens with a rocket launcher.
Excuse me? What did I mean by my reference to classical conditioning? Oh, I'll be happy to explain. Remember how in A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick (again, I know, again) has Alex the anti-hero condition the writer whose wife is raped to have painful flashbacks whenever he hears the song "Singing in the Rain"? Well, the audience gets conditioned the same way. I guarantee you that anyone who ever saw Clockwork thinks of it when they hear the Gene Kelly tune. So guess what? Yep. Tarantino pulls a real Kubrick on the audience by staging some kind of linking device through the scenes in the form of a 1970s flashback radio station that plays hits from that decade. So whenever we hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" today, we flash on the torture scene in the warehouse. And that's not an accident and it isn't paying homage to anybody. It's a thievery and a damned imaginative thievery at that.
I am absolutely not here to act as an apologist for Quentin Tarantino. Neither am I here to make his case for sainthood. I am here to say that with Reservoir Dogs (1992), his first major film, he offered audiences something that had been missing from American movies for more than a while. He made them visually compelling. He made them emotionally exciting. And he made them smart. When Messers White and Pink are arguing about what went wrong during the jewel heist, they speak as men who possess a type of surprising street sophistication regarding their chosen occupation. It doesn't matter whether a gang of jewel thieves could actually be this analytic. What matters is that the gang in this movie is.
I think what bothered some people (Roger Ebert comes to mind) about this movie is not so much that Tarantino went over the line with the profanity and the violence. Clearly he did and in the process created a profane and violent gem. What bothers some critics, I think, is their fear that unscrupulous hacks will come along and snatch up influences from Tarantino the way Tarantino did from directors such as Kubrick and DePalma, the latter having stolen his entire oeuvre from Alfred Hitchcock. Well, people are going to do that and I'm sure they have. But the good news is that somewhere there was a kid who watched Reservoir Dogs when it came out on DVD and started really thinking about the ideas of this movie. A kid with talent. A kid who works in a video store. Or for Netflix. And he has this idea. . .
