Putting the Rant in Tarantino

I’ve been trying to organize my notes about Django Unchained for about two weeks now, and I’m not satisfied with anything I’ve been able to turn them into.  So, as a homage to David Shields--who is considered a writer because he publishes a bunch of unsourced quotes whose real authors are only noted in an appendix (and whose new book was originally titled How Literature Saved My Life Because It Gave Me People To Steal From)--here are those notes, in no particular order at all. 

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino fans can point to as a perfect example of what he does best and why they love it

It’s really two movies:  the first half is For A Few Deutschmarks More; the second half is Inglourious Niggaz.  So it’s a mash-up of a Sergio Leone Western and a revenge fantasy where the Jews Blacks kill Hitler Whitey.  As well as a twisted version of Paleface.

In-jokes abound.  The bar Minnesota Clay is the title of a Sergio Corbucci Western.  There’s a wanted poster for Edwin Porter, who directed the silent movie The Great Train Robbery.  Franco Nero, who played the original Django, is the guy next to Jamie Foxx when he spells out his name.  Samuel L Jackson’s last words (“You son of a b--“) echo Eli Wallach’s in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  The trick horse dance at the end is a direct steal from the Trinity films (including the Trinity theme music under).

Like Brecht, Tarantino steals with impunity.  (I eagerly await his heist movie, where the main character’s sidekick will be named M. Punity.)  And he displays his stolen goods so openly that they appear to be his possessions by right.  But the truth is, he is owned by them.

I don’t get the Australian accent thing at all.

Slavery is to this movie what torture is to Zero Dark Thirty.  Not just the Big Moral Issue, but The Elephant In The Room. The difference between Bigelow and Tarantino is that Bigelow shows you the elephant right up front, and then escorts you through a couple of other rooms that have a bunch of different animals in them.  Tarantino keeps showing you the elephant no matter what room you’re in, because it’s big enough to hide the lack of furniture.

QUESTION:  So if you take that elephant out of this movie, does it still work as a movie?

ANSWER:  On paper?  Sure.  A bounty hunter frees a prisoner because the prisoner can identify someone the bounty hunter is after.  Because the prisoner has a personal vendetta against, say, the evil rancher who framed him for murder, he agrees to a trade: I’ll help you if you help me.  The bounty hunter agrees, teaching the prisoner the tricks of his trade while they accomplish the first mission (The Job Plot), and then either dying or getting wounded heroically while helping the prisoner with his vendetta (The Revenge Plot). 

QUESTION:  You said “on paper.”  What about on film?

ANSWER:  Ah; well now.  There’s a teacher/student story here too.  In The Job Plot, the student learns the value of Doing The Job Without Caring; while in The Revenge Plot, the teacher learns that There Are Some Things Worth Caring About.  And thematically, whether or not he learns that lesson determines whether or not the teacher dies at the end.

I really hated the way Schultz dies at the end.  It was such a giant FU.  The one guy you figure is going to keep his cool turns into the one guy who loses it, like Steve McQueen suddenly turning into Robert Vaughn halfway through The Magnificent Seven. 

Schultz's plot role requires him to grow as a character--to move from the job view of life to the caring view of life.  But in the second half of the film, he’s the audience surrogate.  He views the casual violence of slavery the way we are supposed to: as something sickening, something to be despised.  Is this character evolution?  Or is this just the most likeable character in the movie continuing to be likeable? Is Tarantino even capable of character evolution?  He’s really good at scenes of competing self-interest, but character evolution? 

And how does Django evolve?  In the words of Stuart Klawans from The Nation: "He changes clothes."   And winds up dressed like a black version of Little Joe in Bonanza.

In story terms, you can do the final revenge movement one of two ways: with Teacher and Student fighting (and possibly dying) together, or with the Teacher off the board and the Student fighting alone.  Tarantino chose the second approach.  Not because the Student grows as a character, but because, since he’s alone, the Student is all we have left to identify with, so we’re the ones who make him bigger.  In a sense, by killing off Schultz the way he does, Tarantino is making us do his work for him.

Sidebar: the whole thing feels schematic.  Like Tarantino wrote it backwards and had to figure out a way to get rid of Schultz that would make sense.

Each main character has a double.  Schultz, who could be the grandfather of Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, is an amoral cosmopolitan who speaks at least three languages fluently.  He’s paired off with Calvin Candie, the fake cosmopolitan who affects to be French but God forbid you speak real French to him because he doesn't know the language.  (He’s sort of like Jay Gatsby with slaves.)  Meanwhile Django,  who starts out not knowing basic words in English and who, thanks to the miracle of montage, winds up as fluent with the language as he is fast with a gun, is paired off with Samuel L Jackson’s nasty-ass Stephen, who looks like the love child of Uncle Remus and Uncle Ben, and who (unless I misinterpreted a brief but telling moment in his final confrontation with Django) has spent most of his adult life faking a leg injury to get over with the white folks.  And he is a nasty piece of work, let me tell you.

It makes sense that the members of each pair will face off with each other, but Tarantino (characteristically) undercuts both moments.  Neither one is satisfying.  The Schultz/Candie showdown is so WTF it either gets nervous laughter or cries of anger or both.  And the Django/Stephen showdown, well, all along I figured we’d end up with a Mandingo fight between these two guys, which would have been all kinds of thematically satisfying.  But instead, you got a guy with a gun and a guy with a cane, and the outcome ain’t in question once the guy with the gun begins shooting.

Tarantino quotes Mandingo as an influence, but that movie is an uncle compared to the three Fred Williamson movies from the Seventies that can claim a piece of DU’s parentage: The Song of Nigger Charley, The Soul of Nigger Charley, and Boss Nigger--which is currently available under the single word title Boss, and plays out like a dead serious version of Blazing Saddles. 

Speaking of which: the KKK scene is in this movie?  Straight out of Blazing Saddles.  A bunch of lynch-happy peckerheads arguing about eyeholes in their pillowcases?  You can just hear Cleavon Little saying , “White people are so DUMB, baby.”  It’s a safe laugh, and when they get blown to hell, who cares?  They’re nothing but a bunch of stupid rednecks who deserve to die at the hands of our cultured, politically-correct heroes.  And in the background, you can hear Tarantino saying, “That’s right, modern audience--you laugh.  You laugh away.  Because in about 20 minutes, I'm gonna have an old black guy torn apart by dogs.  Who's your bitch now?”

If Tarantino was a fighter, he would only have two punches: a left jab so pussy it makes you laugh, and then a right to the jaw that makes you see stars.  He makes you laugh, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you care, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you sick to your stomach, and then he reminds you that it’s only a movie; and then he knocks you on your ass again.  And boy, is he a sucker for that “it’s only a movie” move.  Remember the end of Death Proof?  Where Kurt Russell is getting the crap kicked out of him, and suddenly it turns into a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, complete with sound effects?  There’s something like that in all Tarantino’s films, and it’s beginning to feel more like a character flaw than a character trait.

Every time Tanrantino gets close to a real emotion, he points to the camera.  He’s the kind of guy who can’t have sex with you without picking the absolutely worst moment to point out that he’s doing to you what Mickey Rourke did to Kim Basinger in  9 ½  Weeks.

MICKEY ROURKE:  In his dreams.

KIM BASINGER:  Not mine.

I keep coming back to Schultz’s death, because it’s totally arbitrary, and yet, because of the way the film is structured, totally necessary.  There are so many ways a plot necessity can be accomplished, but in the end, the way it’s done says something vital about the artist.  When a man faces death, really faces it, you see exactly how much he values life. When a creator kills off one of his characters, especially someone the audience likes and identifies with, you see the same thing.   He can give him dignity, he can give him disgrace; he can have him come onstage cradling the dead body of his daughter, or he can have her willingly commit suicide because the odds is gone and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.  Or, as in this movie, he can have a character shoot another character and then turn around and say “I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist,” before he gets blown away.  A moment which, the more I think about it, seems to me to be nothing more than Quentin Tarantino talking directly to the audience.   I could have done this so many ways, he’s saying to us.  I could have given Schultz a noble death, or a clever death, or a death that was totally in character for him.  I know that.  But I decided to make it meaningless.  I decided to make it the preface to a ridiculously-over-the-top bloodbath.  I decided to go for the cheap laugh.  I’m sorry--I couldn’t resist.

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino detractors can point to as a perfect example of what he always ends up doing and why they despise it.

Finally

Release Date 5/29/12

Songs for a Tuesday morning: That's where I long to be . . .

"Here comes Randy.  He's alone.  What's his problem?"

That's how Budd Boetticher described the basic set-up of the seven films he made with Randolph Scott in the late 50's. 

Now me, I'm no stranger to the late 50's (except when I wear day makeup).  And yes, I've been depressed lately.  Frankly, I feel like that quote above should read: "Here comes Matthew.  He's alone.  What's his fucking problem anyway?" And because some films are comfort food, I've been spending a lot of time these last few weeks curled up on the couch watching old westerns.  Which means listening to a lot of western title songs.  (And whistling them, too, which has gotten me kicked out of a couple of bars.  With good reason--nothing clears out a Friday night March Madness crowd quicker than a whistled version of "Gunfight At The OK Corral.")

I wanted to give you a sample of what I've been subjecting myself to, and skim the cream rather than scrape the bottom of the barrel (cough)"Liberty Valance"(cough).  So here are two classic Western songs, one from a Howard Hawks film, and one from a John Ford film.  If they're not familiar to you, they deserve to be. 

The Hawks is from Rio Bravo, and if you followed The Sopranos, you heard this played under the credits of one of the episodes in Season 4.  Picture John Wayne listening to this.  Picture John Wayne having to listen to this.  While Walter Brennan makes faces at him off-camera:

My Rifle, Pony and Me - Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson

The Ford is from The Searchers.  It's the title song--not just the two excerpts played at the beginning and the end, but the whole thing.  Which makes you appreciate the genius of Ford.  Because to my tinhorn ear, the whole song is less than the sum of those two excerpted parts.  See if you agree:

The Searchers - Sons of the Pioneers

Till next time, I'm off to ride lonesome; see you seven men from now.

False Grit

If you want to see a textbook example of the difference between a faithfully-filmed novel and a good movie, go see the Coen Brothers True Grit and then rent the Henry Hathaway original from (OMFG, really?) 1969. The latter, for all its softening and mythologizing of the source material, is a much better movie, by which I mean it works as a film. The current version? Not so much. As I said to my online friend Molly Matera, when the death of a horse is the only time I get emotionally involved, then the movie has big problems.

What problems? Generally, a feeling of weightlessness, like there are story beats to be hit, as opposed to a story being told. It’s like the movie was made with the book as a reference or the original film as a reference, instead of as a film in its own right, which means two things: (1) everything feels like a comment instead of a statement; and (2) everyone acting in it is self-aware, as opposed to natural. In this version, Rooster Cogburn is smaller than life, and instead of feeling natural, it feels like a conscious choice NOT to be John Wayne. In this version, the cocky Texas Ranger LeBoeuf is less than comical, and as a result less of a foil for Cogburn, and less of an education to Mattie Ross, who is in turn more studied and less spunky than Kim Darby. And say what you want about Kim Darby as an actress, but in the original, you liked her and wanted her to succeed. In this version, Hailee Steinfield proves she can wrap her tongue around the dialogue, but never wraps her arms around your heart.

And I’m not saying you have to love these people, but you should care about them. I guess. Except that, if you take this version on its own terms, you’re not even asked to do that. You’re only asked to watch, and in return, you’re given, well, satire that doesn't get laughs, a quest plot that seems over before it begins, campfire scenes in the cold night air where you never see anybody's breath, violence without wounds (like shouting without an echo, if you know what I mean), scenes which feel like out-takes from Dead Man (like the guy in the bearskin, complete with bear head), and sequences which are presumably supposed to be funny, like the drunken marksmanship contest, but are just embarrassing. The odd thing is, everybody is obviously in the same movie, and playing on the same level. It’s just not a movie you’d want to see more than once, and the level is below, well, North To Alaska, for instance, or The Sons of Katie Elder, two other Henry Hathaway westerns with John Wayne in ‘em. (Go rent those too.)

Also: pretty much every gunshot in the movie is in the trailer (except for that marksmanship contest), so don’t go into this expecting a two-hour shoot-em-up.

Also part 2: echoing "Leaning On The Everlasting Arms," the song that Robert Mitchum sings throughout Night Of The Hunter? That’s not film, Coens; that’s film school.

Ride Boldly Ride

After sending out Monday's post, I had the following e-conversation with my friend Bill:

BILL: What? Me on crutches and you in a sling? I can't stand it any more!!!!
MATTHEW: Yeah; it's like the end of El Dorado.

Then I sent him this picture:


To which Bill responded:

BILL: That is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time!!!!!! Oh God, how do you do it?

What can I say? I have a magpie mind, and a database of jpegs to match. And a pile of DVD's too. I spent the rest of the day thinking, "Y'know, it's been a few months since I saw El Dorado; maybe I'll pull it out and watch it again tonight." And I did. Instead of writing, of course; because (just as there must always be a novel, and it must always be a Russian novel) there must always be a movie, and it must always be a Western movie, when Matthew is procrastinating about writing.


So why this Western movie? Here’s the plot in a nutshell. Hired gun Cole Thornton (John Wayne) rides into El Dorado to take a job from Bart Jason (Ed Asner), but when his old friend JP Harrah (Robert Mitchum), the town sheriff, tells him that the job entails helping Jason get the deed to the water-rich McDonald Ranch, Wayne literally backs out of the job. On his way back to town, he mistakenly shoots one of the McDonald boys, and when the kid finishes the job by putting a gun to his head, Thornton delivers the body to the boy’s family, and then rides away from that as well, only to be ambushed and shot in the back by Joey, the dead boy’s sister. The bullet turns out to be too close to Thornton’s spine to operate, and a few days later he rides out of town to take a job in a mining town.

Six months later, Thornton rides into a different town, and watches Mississippi (James Caan) kill the last of four men who murdered his friend Johnny Diamond. The dead man works for Nelse McLeod (Christopher George), a gunslinger who is just as fast as Wayne, and who has just been hired for the job that Thornton gave up six months ago. McLeod figures it’s easy pickin’s because Sheriff Harrah is now a drunk, thanks to being jilted by a girl. This is the one piece of news that finally sends Thornton back to El Dorado to (a) reprise the drunken sidekick plot of Rio Bravo with Mitchum in the Dean Martin role and (b) help his friend and side with the McDonalds against Bart Jason. Y’know, like he should have done in the first place. Like John Wayne (being John Wayne) would have done in the first place, right?

Sorry. Not this movie. This is a movie about a man who rides away from everything, as evidenced by the clip below. Since most of my friends know how devoted I am to making over-the-top generalizations, it should come as no surprise when I say that there is no other scene in a John Wayne movie, let alone an American Western, where you will see the following action take place:



It's almost shocking, isn't it? A Western hero retreating. Hell--John Wayne retreating. Literally backing away from a fight. (And check out the Nelson Riddle horns at the end. That same refrain shows up at least once in every episode of Batman.) But this one sequence is what the whole movie is about. People backing away from or not owning up to their responsibilities, to what they owe other people because of their actions.


Take Cole Thornton. He's been paid in advance to work for the bad guy, but he chooses not to. It's never stated outright that he doesn't want to get involved on either side of this battle, but the way he backs out of that scene says it a lot stronger than any words could. Here's a man who knows that if he accepts this job, he'll be doing evil. So he doesn't. But is not doing evil enough? Not the way this movie works. 90 seconds after renouncing evil, one of the McDonald boys takes a wild shot at Thornton and Thornton plugs him in the stomach. The gut-shot kid knows this is a certain death sentence, and finishes himself off. What does Thornton do? He does the decent thing and returns the boy's body to his family; and then rides off again. He doesn't say, as you would expect the Good Guy to say--as you would expect John Wayne to say--"I owe you for the death of your son, so I'm taking his place until this war with Bart Jason is over." Instead, he tries to put some of the blame on the boy's father, for telling the kid what happens to a man who gets gut-shot, and rides off again.


This is not a nice human being, okay? He's not even the nicest guy in the movie. Most people would probably give that title to James Caan's ingenue sidekick, but for my money, it's bad guy Nelse McLeod by a mile. Thanks to a career-best performance by Christopher George, McLeod is just so damn pleasant and cheerful you don't care that he kills people for a living and has no scruples. He's a total professional, and he's relaxed with it. He even dies with a sense of humor. Cole Thornton, on the other hand? About as cuddly as a cactus. Thornton is somebody who doesn't give a shit about anybody, good or bad, except himself. Somebody who is, in essence, a coward, which the movie spells out pretty clearly when Joey McDonald ambushes Thornton and shoots him off his horse. Where does she shoot him? In the back. Which is physically impossible, given the angle of fire as we're watching the movie. But we accept it, because it makes thematic sense. In its own way, it's flawlessly logical: (1) Only cowards who run away from a fight get shot in the back. (2) Cole Thornton has a bullet lodged in his back. Therefore (3) Cole Thornton is a coward. And to make it even more obvious, what happens to Thornton every time that bullet rubs up against his spine? His gun hand goes numb. Because he refused to recognize a debt he owed the McDonalds, his gun hand is useless.


You probably think I'm reading too much into what is essentially a sauntering entertainment, but believe me, it all fits. The first time we see Thornton's gun hand go numb? Right after he finds out from McLeod that JP Harrah is the town drunk. It's like the bullet is an expression of inner guilt; he's subconsciously punishing himself for not taking a side when he had the chance, and now look--his best friend is drinking bottle after bottle of Old Clothesline, the whiskey that hangs you out to dry, and Thornton can't even get on his horse without help. And who's that helping him? Why if it isn't Mississippi, the kid who uses a knife because he can't shoot straight, the kid who just spent two years paying back a debt by killing the men who killed his friend, and is now going to follow Thornton to El Dorado to pay him back for saving his life. He's like one of those innocent idiot knights in King Arthur who run around acting out of honor because it's as natural to them as quibbling about honor is natural to us. Or actually, since he's the only one in the movie to recite poetry, he's like the troubadour, like Alan A Dale with a sawed-off and a funny hat. Or, when you really come down to it, --

(See? Don't get me started on this movie. And I haven't even said anything about the women yet.)


So the movie sets up this wonderful web of debt and responsibility; and then, when Thornton returns to El Dorado, it's like that point in Measure for Measure where the disguised Duke walks into a potential tragedy and twists the plot into a Rube Goldberg machine that is designed to do one thing and one thing only: maneuver Isabella into a position where she gets the chance to either condemn or forgive Angelo. The break is just as sharp in El Dorado, and because the movie is so easy-going it doesn't actually hit you, but it's there, all right. Suddenly we're in a different movie; different but familiar, because the town of El Dorado has suddenly become Hawks Country, where the men are constantly wondering if they're good enough, a youngster gets to prove his stuff, an old codger gets to provide comic relief, and somebody who used to be one of the fastest guns around has become the town drunk because of a girl. (Fun movie fact: when Hawks asked Wayne to do Rio Lobo, Wayne replied by saying: "Do I get to play the drunk this time?") What this means for the set-up is that the closely-worked-out pattern of obligation and uninvolvement that informs the first half of the film gets lost in the second half, and your response to what's on screen depends pretty much on whether you like Rio Bravo enough to see it done through a fun-house mirror. (That's me over there holding up my hand and saying "Count me in." Truth to tell, I'm with Robin Wood on this one, rest his soul.)


If I'm totally honest with myself (and the older I get, the more I better be, right?), I have to admit that the Rio Bravo Redux second half doesn't live up to the promise of the first half, in much the same way that the where-the-fuck-did-THAT-come-from second half of Measure for Measure seems like All's Well Redux, complete with the same unbelievable bed trick. (If I ever become a writing teacher, my class will have only one assignment: take the first half of Measure for Measure, before the Duke intervenes, as a given; now throw out the rest of it and finish the play yourselves.) In both cases, I think the same thing happened. Just like Shakespeare creates an engine that can only create a tragedy, and then re-wires it in full view of the audience to produce a comedy, Hawks sends a gunfighter on a path from indifference to involvement and potentially death, and then delivers him into the forgiving arms of the Rio Bravo situation, which is his own version of the bed trick. Did this happen because neither man was essentially tragic by nature? Did it happen because both works are late career and concerned with redemption more than confrontation?

THE WORLD: Beats me. And really, dude. Comparing a John Wayne movie to Measure for Measure?
MATTHEW: You know Shakespeare played the Duke, right?
THE WORLD: We're leaving.
MATTHEW: No, really. He also played Iago.
THE WORLD: Leaving now.
MATTHEW: And originally, El Dorado was going to be a western version of The Iliad*.
THE WORLD: Will the last person to leave the website please close the tab?

*True story. Leigh Brackett based the original script on a novel called The Stars In Their Courses. I told you not to get me started.

The opening of Stagecoach

Shakespeare: 1877

In the course of his long and storied life, there were only three times when JB Hatfield broke Hickock’s Law and sat with his back to the room, instead of to a wall, while playing cards.

The first time nearly got him killed. That was in 1877, a year after Hickock was murdered. Hatfield had taken the stage into Shakespeare, New Mexico, and after renting a room at the Globe Hotel, he repaired to the Mermaid Tavern, where he joined a three-handed game of stud poker. The only available seat put his back to the bar. He didn’t think twice about sitting in it. There was no one at the bar, and the only other patrons were sitting against the wall, where he could see them.

What Hatfield didn’t notice was the door at the end of the bar which led to the privy in the alley outside. Two minutes after he sat down, Long John Long walked through that door, looked at the table of card players, said, “Well if isn’t my old friend JB,” pulled out a Colt, and snapped a shot at the back of Hatfield’s head.

As Hatfield put it in his memoirs, “Shakespeare is a ghost town now, and if my old friend Long John had taken a second to aim his Colt instead of shooting wildly, I would have been a ghost as well. So I made sure he did not get a chance to fire a second shot.”

Hatfield’s memoirs are famous for arriving at the destination without actually describing the journey, and this episode is no exception. As Mark Twain put it, “He will start a sentence with six bullets in his gun and end it with an empty pistol, but damned if he ever tells you where those bullets went.”

In this case, there were four bullets in all, two from each man. The first, fired by Long John, hit the wall opposite the bar. When Hatfield heard the gunshot, he ducked his head, turned in his chair, went down to the floor on his right knee and fired up at the man with the gun who was standing by the bar. The man’s face came into focus just as Hatfield’s bullet bit into his hip.

“Oh John you are a lucky son of a bitch,” Long John said, and grabbed the bar with his free hand as he began to topple. Steadying himself, Long John aimed his gun at Hatfield’s head.

Hatfield considered shooting Long John in the belly, which was a target that would have been impossible to miss, but Long John was Hatfield’s friend, and you do not shoot a friend in the belly unless you are drunk enough so that you might miss it entirely. So instead, Hatfield fired at Long John’s hand, which was clutching the bar. He didn’t try to hit the fingers. He just wanted to get close enough for normal human reflexes to take over. He calculated that if he got close enough, even someone as slow on the uptake as Long John Long would yank his hand out of the way without thinking about it.

The bullet splintered wood about three inches from Long John’s thumb, and Long John confirmed his basic humanity by yelping and yanking his hand back, and then falling over just as he fired at Hatfield. The bullet went into the ceiling, and Long John hit the floor on his wounded hip. He produced a scream of pain which was embarrassing to hear, and then went silent after Hatfield hit him over the head with a chair.

3:10 to Yuma

Great Western; great movie; and even though going into it you know exactly which members of the crew guarding Russell Crowe are not going to make it to Contention, the way they go (with one exception) is a total surprise. (The exception is the one character who declares "Look at what I just did!" and immediately gets shot -- cf. Serenity.)

But make sure you stick around for the credits. Whenever Russell Crowe's name is supposed to show up (outside of the cast list), the name "Ben Wade" is inserted (as in Dialect Coach for Ben Wade; Personal Assistant to Ben Wade).

I wonder which one of the producers pissed off Crowe so much that he had every credit except his cast appearance changed to his character name . . .