People have been hand-wringing over the ethical pickles of Quentin Tarantino films for years and with his latest release the questions are inevitably being raised again. This time it’s Inglourious Basterds, which Eli Roth has dubbed ‘kosher porn’.
Recent articles have asked if it’s right to enjoy a film in which the Jewish characters fight fire with fire by murdering Nazis in the style of concentration camp guards. Tarantino as a purveyor of the tasteless? It was ever thus. But the banality of this new tastelessness is symptomatic of a much larger problem.
Tarantino seems to construct his films as a wedding planner would construct a big day. There’s something old – we have actors plucked out of failing careers and obscurity for ‘star’ turns (Pulp Fiction’s Bruce Willis and John Travolta, Jackie Brown’s Pam Grier, Kill Bill’s David Carradine and now Christoph Waltz).
There is something new – always an ‘outrageous’ gimmick (Jews killing Nazis; Michael Madsen chopping off ears; Kurt Russell killing women in his car; Robert De Niro having anal sex). His blueness is evident in his trademark dialogue. And then there are the ‘homages’ to self-conscious obscurities, something borrowed, indeed.
All significant filmmakers have templates to work from, inspirations and tics, using others’ work as foundations on which to build their own projects. Woody Allen did it with his early films (the part-Buster Keaton / part-Marx Brothers hijinx of Bananas et al), David Lynch’s early movies draw more from Luis Bunuel and Kafka than you think. Even Uwe Böll learnt a thing or two from early ’90s movies such as Super Mario Bros and Street Fighter. Namely, bad craftsmanship.
However, these filmmakers developed. Allen discovered Bergman, and ever since has turned his neuroses, first expressed with slapstick then with rom-coms then with melodramas, into a wall of insufferable caterwauling that culminated in the manna for misanthropes that was Deconstructing Harry. David Lynch has become one of the most avant-garde big-name directors currently working with the one-two art-out whammy of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. And Uwe Böll has delivered on his promise of being the worst filmmaker in the world by plumbing new depths of egregiousness with BloodRayne (starring, incidentally, Michael Madsen).
The point here is that all these figures have transcended their influences and origins, creating films that are individual, yet progressive (okay, apart from Böll). Tarantino’s idiosyncrasies and his glorification of the trashy and ephemeral aspects of film culture were new and exciting in his early movies, where his writing was fresh, sharp and different. His work was ‘post-modern’ because it appeared self-aware and knowing, full of pop culture references and self-conscious filmic devices (Uma drawing a square on the screen in Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dog’s heist movie without a heist in it). Jackie Brown followed, joining this cleverness with an increased understanding of character and emotion. That last shot of the movie, in which Pam Grier stares out into the audience, breaks the heart every time. The film is increasingly seen as his masterpiece, and proved he was a director capable of a lot more.
After this, things got problematic. He took a backward (albeit entertaining) step with Kill Bill, which was yet another tribute to the films he grew up with, one that ditched the subtlety of Jackie Brown. He did this again with the loving tribute to grindhouse cinema that was Death Proof. Any pretence that Kill Bill made towards character development (Uma as both a fighter and a mother) was forgotten completely.
And now he is truly stagnating with Inglourious Basterds proving three times is definitely not the charm. For all its period trimmings, with Brad Pitt on board and a big budget veneer, it’s still something old (a look back at spaghetti westerns), something new (Jews get their own back in World War II), something borrowed (a ‘reimagining’ of Italian movie Quel maledetto treno blindato, stuffed full of nods to the films of GW Pabst) and something blue (inane, profane dialogue and uber-violence). It’s all tied up in a trademark self-serving meta-cinematic universe (with an ending that suggests film will save the world) to a soundtrack of ’60s and ’70s music which is similar, of course, to everything else he has ever done.
You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the moral implications of Tarantino’s films but why should you bother talking about the relevance of his films when he has clearly lost his way artistically?
