Kill Bill

A few days ago I was chatting with my dad about our various writing projects.

Dad: You know how you’ve been writing about Quentin Tarantino?

Me: Yes?

Dad: You know he used to work in a video store?

Me: Uh-huh.

Dad: And you used to work in a video store?

Me: Yeah.

Dad: Well there you go.

Well there I go. Once upon a time Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store – and so did I.

Today I write about pop culture, and Tarantino makes it.

There you go.

Tarantino’s latest film also begins "Once upon a time . . ." and as to be expected, reactions to his "movie movie universe" movie, Inglourious Basterds, are once again as mixed as his genre conventions.

Though I didn’t explicitly say so in my recent three part post here for Bitch exploring the question of feminism in Tarantino’s work, I’m a fan – a cautious, conscientious fan, who recognizes that his work is problematic on many levels. For me, the combination of the issues in his work, and the visceral pleasure of the movie experiences he creates, presents a conflict that is worth exploring. Additionally, and I think this is crucial to my experience and interpretation of his work, he is a movie-maker of, and pop culture influence on, my generation. Pulp Fiction is as much a marker in my life as Star Wars, Goonies, or Trainspotting, Wonder Woman, 90210, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Tarantino and I may not have grown up watching the same movies, regardless of our once-upon-a-time employ, but his work has led me to his influences, which in turn have furthered and enriched my relationship to popular culture.

So why didn’t I enjoy Inglourious Basterds?

 

Thank you all for a great conversation this week regarding the question “Is Quentin Tarantino a feminist?”

Responses were as varied as could be expected and ranged from expressions of the power and strength one may feel after watching Zoë, Abernathy, and Kim, and a desire to adapt Beatrix Kiddo’s better qualities; resilience, confidence and physical prowess.

After several years, a lot of script work and much trademark frenetic verbosity, writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited Inglourious Basterds – his "bunch of guys on a mission" film set during the Second World War – finally premieres on the 21st of this month.

With a nearly all-male cast it’s arguably a return to the tough-guy roots of his earlier movies Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), where manly-men bantered over such topics as the meaning of Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" and the global appeal of hamburgers – regardless of whether they’re measured in imperial or metric units.

But the famously fast-talking cinephile’s works of the past decade have not been meditations on masculinity, rather they are odes to women warriors of B-movies past – women we've been highlighting and exploring to some extent in this blog. Tarantino drew influence from such iconic characters as the hot-headed go-go dancer Varla of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), the vigilantes Coffy & Foxy Brown, and the Samurai, Lady Snowblood, (as well as his own mother), to create some of the most intriguing and racially diverse female characters in contemporary American film.

Though they often repeat the contradictions inherent in representations of women in Exploitation films, and thus come from already problematic source material, the kick-ass heroines of Jackie Brown (1991), Kill Bill (2003 & 2004), and Death Proof (2007) still show visceral examples of female power that women can get excited about.

So this week we’ll take an in-depth look at these characters and Tarantino’s work, and hopefully have a discussion regarding the question: "Is Quentin Tarantino a feminist?"