After the success of Basterds, Tarantino went on to craft two more violent historical revisionist films, Django Unchained and the newly released Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood. Landa’s tendency to devalue the truth is nothing new for Tarantino characters, but the gleeful, gruesome murder of Adolf Hitler by insurgent Jewish-American soldiers certainly was. It was not until Inglourious Basterds, though, that Tarantino started indulging in an entirely different type of factual manipulation: the willful denial of historical events. Vincent is recounting an anecdote he heard about Mia’s husband Marcellus, and Mia challenges him: “Is that a fact?” Vincent’s response implies that he recognizes the distinction between fact and rumor: “No, no. In Pulp Fiction, Vincent (John Travolta) makes a comment to Mia (Uma Thurman) about hearsay similar to Landa’s in Inglourious Basterds. Pink), and know full well how little factual context they have to gauge the veracity of the stories they are being told. The men in Reservoir Dogs are all strangers to one another, sharing only color-coded monikers with each other (Mr. Despite this reliance on these narratives, Tarantino’s characters are usually aware of just how carefully constructed, and easily manipulated, such stories are. In Reservoir Dogs, a heist gone wrong forces a group of thieves to return to their warehouse hideout and figure out what happened, one story at a time. This idea manifests in Tarantino’s early films through characters who lack information, and must use stories to fill in the gaps. In worlds bereft of justice, telling a compelling story can be the difference between life and death, and becomes its own ethical basis for distinguishing right from wrong. It’s a variation on a common sentiment in the Tarantino universe: what happened matters not nearly as much as the story about what happened. In fact, if there’s one thing that defines the eclectic ouevre of films he has directed, it is his characters’ meta obsession with storytelling.
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